The Albino Telepath Saga
by DBAinsw
Summary: Discontinued: I keep this long, long story around as an example of what NOT to do. Once this was my superfantasy played out in a forum others might read it in. Now I see it as typing practice with an embarrasing garystu focus.
1. The Plot

Legal Disclaimer: I don't own Teen Titans. Then again, I'm not making any money off of this, so it really doesn't matter anyway.

Author's Disclaimer:

Welcome readers to what is shaping up to be quite an impressive début piece for me. Here I present to you the start of what will no doubt be a very long, deeply detailed work of Drama, Comedy, Action, and Science Fiction, involving themes ranging from childish slapstick and general angst all the way up to moderate language, violence, descriptions of gore and excessive pain, and maybe even mild sexual undertones. While most of the story will be quite tame and enjoyable, I plan times where I will definitely be pushing PG-13, so if that bothers you, leave now. For those interested in enjoying my personal take on the Teen Titans and their wonderful characters, as well as the DC Comics universe in general, and aren't afraid of some mature themes, stick around. With any luck, you'll enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Mid Story Addition: Hey, this is my extra intro for those just starting the story, which has now reached an impressive length. The main purpose of this is to hopefully convince you to stick through it, even though it isn't likely to provide the instant gratification that people seem to be so hung up about these days.

The first thing to note is that the introductory chapters are in no way representative of the story's general quality. I wrote these months ago, and they represent me warming up after a half-year break from writing. Honestly, the contrast in quality between the first two chapters and, say, the fifth chapter, is stupendous, so if you find these early sections of poor quality, zip ahead a little before you give up on me.

The second big note is that this is a highly experimental piece for me. At various times I was possessed of the desire to go in entirely new directions with the plot, including one four chapter stint that can effectively be considered a completely different story within a story. If you find the plot interruption or genre shift annoying, just skip it, the only thing you'll miss is some better than decent writing and a cartload of foreshadowing.

That said, on with the show!

Intro: A nice little introduction to the villains and their dastardly plans. All villains are original, for now, so be prepared to meet some nasty people. Just how nasty will become clear over the course of the story.

Chapter 1: The Plot

An Unknown Location

In a long dark meeting room, five figures sat spaced along a table. At one end was a figure sitting at the head, then two on each side of him, and finally, a large blank monitor at the far end. The room was so dark that nothing could be seen of any figure's face or silhouette, and this situation seemed fine by each of the participants in this shady discussion. The only method of distinguishing between them are colored placards sitting in front of each. At the head of the table sits White, to his right sit Red and Blue, and to his left sit Green and Yellow. As we enter, White has just finished dressing down Blue for making some stupid complaint or another.

"Now, if you would all please direct your attention to the monitor, I can continue the meeting, unless you have anything else to add, Blue?" spoke the figure behind the while placard. His voice was deep and calm, and betrayed no hint of anything remotely resembling mercy or pity.

"N…No sir," answered Blue's low, rumbling, and above all, stupid sounding voice. His was one that betrayed no hit of higher thinking processes, but spoke volumes about things like overwhelming size, strength, and ignorance.

"Why do you have to be so hard on ol' Blue there Whitey?" spoke Red, with the smooth voice of a man that knew his way around nightclubs, record recording studios, and the ladies. "You know the processes of cogent thought are a bit over his head."

"Who is you callin' coagulated?" snapped Blue, banging on the table hard enough to make the whole room shudder from the impact. Fortunately White had had it reinforced after the last three times it had been broken into flinders.

"Calm down Blueboy, before you get me all shook up," drawled a sultry female voice from behind the green placard. "You have useful abilities too. Without those _Big_ muscles of yours we'd all still be in prison."

"Aww it wasn't hardly nuthin' at all Green," responded the suddenly calm Blue with obvious embarrassment in his voice.

Red, probably looking to score, tried, "I helped out too you know Green," in his best charming stud voice, over which many a woman had melted before.

"Stuff it Red, not interested," was the flat snipe that disintegrated his clearly lewd aspiration.

Red felt the sting, definitely worse because of Yellow's sudden gurgling laughter, like someone trying to blow bubbles in hot tar with a soda straw.

"(Gurkle Gurkle) you gog gowtilty shog down man (Gok-Gurkle Gurkle sputter pop)" Yellow's disgusting laughter and taunting prompted Red to a furious silence, and also to emit a dull orange glow that stood out brightly in the darkened room.

"I'll fry you you disgusting pus heap!" began Red explosively, clearly intending to make good on his threat.

"ENOUGH OF THIS," boomed White's deadly calm voice, cutting off the flurry of arguing and potential acts violence before they could even begin. "We will continue the meeting now," he continued in his normal, but oh so icy voice, inviting no protest and receiving none in turn. Imperceptible movements on his part caused the view screen to light up, displaying a blue and green planet from orbit.

"This pathetic excuse for a backwater planet is called Earth." Began White, gaining the others' rapt, or in Blue's case, rapidly deteriorating, attention. "Though rather laughable in respects to technological advancement and cultural evolution, it has one simple advantage that makes it exactly what we need to serve as our base of operations for our new crime syndicate."

Met only with incredulous silence, well, incredulous for three and idiotic for one, White was forced to continue.

"The planet earth rests on and interdimentional axes of time and space. (More silence, White gains an edge of exasperation on his normally cold voice) That means that odd things happen to Earth more than any other place in the known multiverse. So far there have been multiple attacks by fell beings from space overlords like Darkside all the way to underworld fiends like Trigon the Terrible. It has also managed to attract the universe's most potent and unbeatable superheroes in an organization known as the Justice League, as well as several other organizations of lesser renown but comparable power. Almost daily it experiences some new kind of odd happening, and this is what keeps these heroes employed."

"Wig all due respeg Whige, why would we _Wang_ to go goo such a hero-full place?" broke in Yellow.

"I was getting to that," he said back with an unmistakable threat. Cowed, all remained silent for the remainder of the presentation.

Pressing another button, White changed the screen to a wire-frame model of an extremely complicated looking device that, by the scale meter to it's side, would seem to be the size of a football stadium. "This machine is called a time-space oscillogenerator. When placed in at a nexus of time-space flux like Earth, it can generate enough energy to power a galactic armada of ships, and also has the interesting side effect of boosting my own mental powers considerably. My proposal is that we infiltrate the planet right under the noses of the Justice League, construct an oscillogenerator on one of the planet's three super flux concentrations, and use the power gained to conquer the planet's heroes. My mind control powers will be increased to such a level that I can use them all as my puppets. With them under my control we can quickly rise to be the greatest criminal organization in the galaxy, and perhaps even it's dominators."

Emboldened by the maniacal genius of their leader's plot, the other criminals chuckled evilly, possessed of a diabolical confidence none had felt since each of their individual captures in the past. One however, did not share this particular feeling.

"White baby, what about the IDP?" cut in a concerned Green. "Won't those killjoys notice the power burst and come to investigate in that unfortunately instantaneous manner they have? I like a good ride on the power trip express as much as any of you boys, but I don't relish another stretch in the can after and IDP instant response fleet shows up."

White let out a low hiss at the though of the IDP, who indeed had managed to stop even him when he was working alone at his first crack at a criminal career. It wasn't a fleet that had gotten him, but rather one of their special agents. The Inter-Dimensional Police had an unfortunate ability to recruit all the multiverse's best and brightest, and one of them had stopped him in his megalomaniac tracks. This time though, he intended to be ready for them.

"Green my Dear, your caution is noted and well warranted, but I won't let those IDP fools get me twice. The oscillogenerator emits an energy form that no known sensor system can detect, and this planet's location in time-space is so scrambled that the IDP's tracking systems won't be able to detect our powers either—as long as we take some simple precautions. The only thing that could possibly go wrong is if the local IDP special agent (he seethed enormously at the thought of the being that had brought him low so recently; but he didn't break sentence at all) were to catch on to our activities. This I have taken measures against, and I am monitoring constantly, so it is also of little importance."

"Well, I suppose I should get ready to celebrate our soon to be realized victory as well," she responded, though the misgivings had not left her voice.

With all of his lackeys ("_or 'partners', if that was what they prefer" _he thought) pacified for the time being, White took a moment to admire his own brilliance. Not only would he be set down the path of universal, or perhaps even multi-universal conquest, but also he could ditch the extras any time he desired. He may have needed their paltry help to bust out of the IDP's central holding facility, but once the oscillogenerator was complete, they were no longer any more necessary than friends had ever been to White. That moment of intense euphoria never reached his expression however (not that anyone could tell in the dark), and another flicker of motion from him set the screen to display the next portion of his plot.

"The place I have chosen as our best bet for constructing the oscillogenerator unimpeded by the planet's multitude of heroes is a city on the west coastal area of it's most heavily developed continent. The natives call it 'Jump City,' and along with 'Gotham City,' and 'Metropolis,' it is one of the planet's time-space super-concentrations. Unlike the other two, it is defended by no more than a few children super-beings, and will be the perfect location to begin construction."

Of course, there were two things that White failed to consider. One, that there was a reason that the IDP special agent for this region defeated him last time, and second, that he was not dealing with child super heroes. He was dealing with the Teen Titans, which is something else entirely.

Preview: Coming up next we have (DAH DUM!) the Titans! (YAAYYY!) In come everybody's favorite super-powered minors on a pleasant little day in their lives, having no concept of the sinister forces arrayed against them in: Blissfully Unaware.


	2. Blissfully Unaware

Ch 2 pre script: I wrote this chapter in a good mood and it came out very lighthearted. Have fun with this one because next the story takes a turn for the serious that won't let up for quite a while.

Chapter 2: Blissfully Unaware

Titans Tower, Wedensday, 7:30 A.M.

Robin walked through the calm, cool halls of Titans Tower, admiring the early morning silence as he contemplated what a great thing it was to be a super hero. With a city as mysteriously prone to assaults by super-villains, aliens, and death-bots as Jump City tended to be, a hero team could get a sweet deal on everything from real-estate to pizza deliveries. The best part of all though, was that, not only did he and his friends get a spectacular set up, but they were really saving the city money on reconstruction costs and crime fighting, not to mention ransom deliveries. It made it so that helping people and saving lives was like an endless dream of spectacular battles, challenging mysteries, and the kind of leisure time with his friends (even between training and fighting crime, there was still plenty) that most guys his age could only wish for. Oh sure, the risks were disgusting and there were some serious stress issues (he had a mildly obsessive attitude toward crime fighting that sometimes killed the fun factor) but these paled in comparison to the rewards.

His pleasant reverie was shattered by the spectacular explosion of noise from the kitchen that was the near-daily breakfast brawl between Cyborg and Beast Boy.

"TOFU!" shouts the small green changeling, gripping onto their beaten up old frying pan with octopus tentacles. He had one around the pan and the other around the kitchen counter, trying his level best to wrench it away from the mechanical grip of his best friend/breakfast arch-nemesis Cyborg.

"EGGS!" shouts the half-man half-machine technological marvel, using his cybernetic arm's mechanical claw form to exert a spectacular gripping force on the relatively tiny cooking utensil.

"Friends, please desist!" insisted Starfire, the red-haired Tamaranean beauty that graced the team with both her startlingly refreshing alien naivete and kindness, as well as her powerful green starbolts. "I'm sure that there is some agreeable compromise between the consumption of real and substitute breakfast substances!"

"Forget it Star," broke in an exasperated Robin, "They can't even hear you when they get like this."

"Robin, why is it that their usually friendly nature transforms like a frightened plenthack during breakfast?"

"Star... just put it down to the vagrancy of friendship and leave it alone. That's the only way to understand moments like this," said Robin, having to raise his voice over the sound of dishes breaking and metal clanging against linoleum tiles.

With a sudden and resounding "BANG" the frying pan snapped apart halfway through its basin, sending the two that had been contesting its control flying to opposite sides of the common room. Beast Boy's aerial path landed him smack against the opposite wall, spread eagle and unconscious, where he promptly slid down and landed on an unfortunately placed cactus. "EEEAAH," came his squeal of pain, piercing everyone's ears just as spines pierced his rear. The path of his subsequent flailing sent him running forward until he was brought up sort by the kitchen table's edge hitting him in the stomach. He slid slowly off and onto his knees, then onto his side on the floor, stars in his eyes.

Cyborg meanwhile, who had merely fallen back with a thud into the corner formed by the counters, was laughing his head off at his friend's misfortunes. The huge and uncontrollable explosions of mirth shook the walls, and, unfortunately, the cabinets above him that had already been weakened by his impact beneath them. With the sound of wood buckling, the cabinet leaned forward, flung open, and delivered its payload of dishes directly to Cyborg's metal skull. Breaking one at a time in quick succession, it sounded like some odd percussion instrument going up its scale as each successively larger plate preceded the last in shattering on his cranium. When the last had fallen, Cyborg had a brief respite to see the stars circling his head before the pots began their decent. With a series of resounding clangs, each punctuated by Cy's cries of pain ("_Bang, _oww, _Clang_, ugg, _Bongg_, aRgGh, _KABONG_, _whimper_) the pots exhausted their potential energy onto his head as well. The _coup de grace_ rolled out last, a mysteriously placed bowling ball (_"So THAT'S where it was"_, thinks B.B. later on), wasting no time in clobbering the already pummeled Cyborg. With that last resounding impact (WHAM!) the cabinet lay empty, and Cyborg lay TKO'd.

Of course, from the start, Robin had also been laughing his ass off. Something about the surprised and essentially mild pain of others tends to have that effect (as opposed to real serious injuries), and every moment of Beast Boy and Cyborg's pain was cracking him up. Starfire was a bit more polite about it, her eye's widening immensely in shock at the initial accident, and at Robin's immediate reaction. Within moments of Beast Boy's shriek of pain, fitful giggles began to squeeze their way out, and by the time the bowling ball had knocked out Cyborg, neither could breath from the force of their laughter. Robin was actually rolling around on the ground as Starfire banged on a nearby table, smashing cracks into it with her alien strength. Finally though, concern overcame mirth and they went to check on their friends' health.

Robin reached Beast Boy first, and when his gentle shaking got only low moans of pain in response, he rolled the little green dude over and spied the one cactus prong that had managed to lodge in his butt. Pulling some needle-nose pliers from his ever-ready utility belt, he took the tough love approach and yanked the prong mercilessly from B.B.'s rear. With a "YIPE" of pure pained surprise, Beast Boy transformed into a long eared hound dog and began dragging his wounded bottom around on the ground as he yipped in agony.

Starfire meanwhile had determined that his metal plating had prevented serious injury to Cyborg's head, and tried to get him to regain consciousness.

"Friend Cyborg, do the lights remain on? Do the tiny people still reside in your head?" she asked with deep concern in her voice.

"Star, I think you mean 'Is anybody home?'" corrected Robin, admiring the indescribable cuteness of Starfire's trouble with idioms.

"Yes of course," she said, embarrassed in spite of herself. "Robin, I can not seem to rouse consciousness into friend Cyborg. What should we do?"

"I have a plan Star, just sit tight," responded Robin cryptically. "Beast Boy!"

"Whaaat?" complained the aching changeling, rubbing his sore tush.

"Get over here and take of your shoe off," was his unexplained request.

"Dude, what's up?" asked Beast Boy as he kicked off his left shoe and walked up behind the others.

"Give sleeping beauty here a dose of the tried and true 'smelling salts'" Robin said with a grin.

"Ohhh... Yes! Sweet revenge, mwuahhahaha!" cackled Beast Boy, as he slowly raised his greenly glowing sock toward Cyborg's unconscious from. One quick whiff was all it took.

"AHHHGGG! What is that FUNK!?" shouted the instantly alert mechanical man, water fairly shooting from his eyes as his nose began to bleed slightly.

"Just a little something to get you up, Cy," said Robin though teeth gritted against bursting laughter.

The hyjinx having come to a close, they were suddenly left with a huge mess in the kitchen and little ability to make anything, having lost most of their plates and pots to Cyborg's head. After a quick job of cleaning, reluctantly done but imposed implacably by Robin, they sat hungrily at the kitchen table.

"Looks like we're going to IHOB--and no bones about it from you two!" declared Robin forcefully, when it looked like the dynamic duo of breakfast disorder would try to complain.

"Oooh, the temple to high cholesterol early morning consumption! I love engaging in the breaking of fasts there!" declared Starfire as she nearly exploded with glee. The rest of the crew agreed as well. Except for one.

"I don't think so," came a rather unhappy sounding (but ultimately neutral) voice from the far side of the room, "There is no chance of me going out to eat in that madhouse."

"Too bad Raven," began Cyborg, "You snooze you lose, and you weren't here to help decide."

"My early morning meditation takes precedence over the slapstick act that you bunch had going on down here," came her stilted reply.

"Don't worry Raven, we can stop at that Chinese tea shop on the way," assured the ever tactful Boy Wonder. Obviously still reluctant, Raven acceded with a nod in the face of her friends' unified front. She decided that she could handle huge crowds and screaming children if she had a pot of her special leaf blend on hand.

"Good, lets go eat," said Robin. "Cy, get the car. The rest of us will meet you out front."

"All Right! I get to drive!" exclaimed cyborg, punching the air in victory. "You guys are gonna love the new improvements I made to the T-Car the other day. Now I can reach speeds that would make a fighter pilot puke!"

A chorus of groans went around the room as they all made their way out.

Later, at the International House Of Breakfast

"Are you sure you want to eat here Robin?" asked Cyborg as he drove slowly past the building. He was obviously referring to the line that always stretched far out the front door at this time of morning. Robin, sitting shotgun, considered the absurd wait that such a line would mean, then reluctantly confirmed everyone's fears.

"I tell you guys, their Southwest-Style Steak Mega-Omelet is worth the wait," he defended his decision.

"So is their tofu breakfast burrito!" chimed in Beast Boy from his position in the right back seat.

"And their cakes of the pan remind me of the obal'spas my mother used to make me on Tamaran!" added Starfire with enthusiasm, nearly hopping out of the back middle seat.

"I do like me some eggs," added Cyborg, drooling slightly. "It can be eggs benedict, scrambled eggs, fried eggs, poached eggs, egg sandwich, egg salad, omelets, y'know, just as long as it's eggs."

"I, for one, have no reason at all to want to go in there," said the despondent Raven, dreading the hectic restaurant more than most of the villains she'd faced. She sat next to Starfire, who's inane and cheerful chatter was marginally preferable to Beast Boy's pathetic and incessant attempts to make her laugh. She stared out the window and thought calm, tranquil thoughts to keep her anxiety from blowing the door off.

"Don't stress Raven, they'll let you brew your tea there, and you won't even notice the crowds after we're seated," Robin assured her. She mumbled something about "_I don't stress_" but took some small measure of comfort from his assurances anyway. He was the only person she'd ever met who could actually reassure her of anything.

In any case, the five parked, (Cyborg had to use the car's deployable hover jets to beat out three others for a space) disembarked, and got their names on the waiting list (Titans, party of five). Almost from the moment they walked in, every eye was on them, and it wasn't long before a cute girl walked up and asked for an autograph. Of course, once the first person had had the guts to do so (and Beast Boy, always a sucker for the ladies, had unthinkingly accepted) everyone else who had been restrained only by lingering doubts about weather it was "okay," advanced in a cavalcade of fan-dome.

"Plan 'rearguard'!" shouted Robin, reading the signs and initiating one of their standard fan-escape plans. At this signal, Robin and Beast Boy, by far the best at dealing with overexcited fans, distracted the crowd by shouting "Free autographs!" Meanwhile Starfire, who didn't really have the disposition to deal with the fanboys that were always accosting her, and Raven, who abhorred being the object of anyone's admiration, ducked out behind Cyborg's enormous stature while he slipped the lady running the list of names a twenty. Mr. Jackson, their reputation, and their obvious distress convinced her to move them to the top.

Using voice amplifiers, Cyborg then shouted, "I'M SORRY EVERYBODY, BUT IT'S TIME FOR US TO EAT NOW, SO WE'D APPRECIATE BEING _LEFT ALONE_!!" The force of his amplified voice was such that not even rabid fans could ignore it, and the people backed away in shell-shocked confusion as they gripped aching ears. The five were shown to a table, Robin and Beast Boy being carried as they tried to collect themselves after being ravaged by overzealous admirers.

Soon enough, the five were seated, served, and eating in peace. Robin, Starfire, Raven, Cyborg, and Beast Boy sat around a table (in that order) and managed to make the most of their morning. Aside from the flash of photographs and more than a few starring rubbernecks at other tables, the fans troubled them no more. They settled into conversation, joking, and the stuffing of faces, thoroughly enjoying, or in Raven's case, accepting the unavoidable reality of, their breakfast out. Then of course, as must always happen in Jump City, the Titans' happy breakfast was interrupted by something unexpected.

At the same time, outside in a junk-heap van

"Do you really think this is a good idea?" asked a nervous little fat man, as he pulled a pair of pantyhose over his head.

"Will you stop asking me that!" snapped an irate, tall, thin man as he pulled on gloves. The two obvious criminals were dressed in gray jumpsuits, like a janitor's, along with black gloves, boots, and pantyhose masks. The tall one was the leader, while the short fat one was a cowardly stooge. Both however, were armed to the teeth with extremely advanced looking weaponry.

"We didn't rob that weapons research facility to sit around and cower now did we?" continued the thin man. "With these weapons, not even the Teen Titans can stop us."

"I don't know Sharky," the fat one said again.

"You're right Bubba, you don't know. I know, and what I know is that WE WILL BE RICH! Now all you have to do is back me up with that laser cannon and try not to loose that little bit of nerve you have!"

Thoroughly cowed, Bubba sat in silence, but his pre-robbery nervousness prompted him to fill the silence with his stupidity.

"Sharky, how was it that you learned the combination to that weapons lockup door in the lab? Us janitors ain't told that kind of thing."

"If you _must_ know," started Sharky, his voice dripping with annoyance, "it was fate."

"Fate?" Bubba questioned in awe.

"YES FATE!" Sharky snapped back, "It came to me in a dream, what could be more fateful than that?"

"Yeah... of course." Venturing one more thing, he asked his gambit silence filler. "And why was it that we're going to start our crime spree with this IHOB?"

"_Because_ you ninny, I'm hungry, and I want to pick up a Southwest-Style Steak Mega-Omelet!" he shouted with understandable frustration. "Now shut up and follow my lead," he snapped as he stepped out the car.

Back inside the IHOB

"ALRIGHT, EVERYBODY FREEZE!" shouted a weasely little voice over the din of eating people.

"YEAH, THIS IS A STICK UP!" followed a stupid sounding voice in kind.

Everybody was shocked into silence for a moment, turning to look at the two pantyhose-wearing crooks that had had the bad luck to stick up this particular IHOB, this particular morning. The irony of the situation hit everyone at basically the same moment, and uproarious laughter was the only thing that greeted their loud threats.

"WHAT THE HELL IS SO DAMN FUNNY?" asked the skinny crook, with slightly less bravado and certainty than he had had a moment ago. Without bothering to stop laughing, the restaurant patrons all turned simultaneously toward the Titans, who were the only five in the joint not cracking up. They all had slightly annoyed and frighteningly serious expressions.

At the sight of them, Sharky's face cycled through three shades of blue under the pantyhose. Bubba sputtered "T,T,T,T,T, tuh, tuh, tuh..." then fainted dead away. Robin, more than a little irked, but trying to make the best of the moment, was the next to speak.

"Hey boys. I can't say I'm happy to see you, but then again, a little after-breakfast workout always settles my meal. I can't speak for my friends, of course, who I'm sure would rather finish in peace, so, skinny man, I'll give you the opportunity to wait outside for the police to arrive and give yourselves up peacefully." He pauses for effect, then "Or we can do this the hard way."

"FUCK YOU!" shouted Sharky, who was possessed with slightly more spiteful rage than blind fear at that moment. He immediately tried to train the laser cannon on the Titans, but he never really stood a chance.

Even as he was speaking to the thug, Robin had given Raven a small hand signal. Before the crook could lash out in fury then, she had muttered "Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos" and enveloped the thin man's weapon in black telekinetic energy. Jerking the weapon from his hands, she used its butt to smack him senseless, and with a series of amusing crunching sounds and cries of pain, allowed him to join his friend on the floor with a thud.

There was a moment of silence after he hit the ground, a moment broken by a cavalcade of cheers. Every voice in the house was raised in praise for the town's superheroes, who had once again proven their worth without question. Seeing now as a good time to be finished, Robin signaled for the Titans to get a move on. As they rose to leave, the IHOB manager walked up and personally ripped their bill in half, to the great approval of all present. Frowning slightly, Robin knocked gently on Cyborg's metal plating. When the metal man leaned down, he whispered something in his ear. Frowning just a little, Cyborg discreetly slipped a twenty under his dirty plate for the waitress. (In case you didn't notice, he handle's the team's money.) That done, they made their exit, Robin making a pit stop to tie up the unconscious criminals, and Cyborg taking a moment to lock down their weapons' power cells so nobody got any ideas before the police arrived.

An unknown location

_"That didn't go quite as planned,"_ thought a slightly perturbed White, staring at the image of his first attack's abject failure. When he had manipulated the impressionable Mr. Sharky into stealing the weapons and attacking the IHOB, he hadn't expected much, but he had at least expected the two buffoons to get a shot off, maybe maim a bystander or two, SOMETHING. Instead he was faced with the creeping suspicion that these enemies might require a bit more of his attention than he had previously thought. Utterly unconcerned none the less, White considered his next course of action.

"_There isn't any use in pulling my next punch,_" he plotted to himself, "_I think I'll make the next one a crushing blow and finish this without any skirmishing. Quick killing strikes are always best in the end._"

With a smile of contentment, he also considered the fact that his strike against that accursed IDP agent that had bested him before should be taking place about now. That couldn't fail to at least throw the bastard off his trail...

Preview: The Titans take a break for a while and my own character gets his time in the limelight. Titan fans don't despair, my story arcs will integrate all the characters soon, and then the real fun begins. Prepare for: Enter Skye.


	3. Enter Skye

Ch 3 intro: Here we have a goodly chunk of original sci-fi from me, designed to introduce my OC and begin to reveal his powers and secrets. I'm big on foreshadowing in all these chapters, so keep your eyes open and you'll be rewarded later.

Chapter 3: Enter Skye

Somewhere in slipspace, far from Earth

In the vast swirling chaos of slipspace, a majestic craft plowed along at a steady clip. Its construction is best described as something like a swan, with a long thin forward cylinder flaring out to a larger body area and further to two huge swept forward wing fins. The ship was symmetrical along the middle, so that the top and bottom were indistinguishable, and it didn't seem to really matter which end was up. In all it was about as long as two city busses end to end, with a wing span of about two-thirds the length. It was sparkling silver all over, except for three black rings that traced horizontally all the way around the ship. One went around the upper portion of the ship, the next went all the way around the ship at its thickest point, and the last went around the ship's bottom area (which was identical to the top). The engine looked like a long, thin, elliptical nozzle from which an impressively bright fan of blue plasma constantly emitted. The paroxysm of swirling color and twisting perspective that made up the slipspace subdimension caused the immaculate silver of the spacecraft to flare brilliantly in a spectrum of colors and hues that would boggle the mind.

Aboard the ship's bridge, a young man sat in the command chair, surrounded by dozens of screens held up by thin jointed arms. Beyond the screens immediately surrounding his command seat was a 20' main view screen that took up the entire front wall. Behind him was a set of double doors that lead back to the living quarters and engine room. Everything was done over in a white, silver, and black motif, making it look like a poorly decorated but high tech bathroom.

The young man himself looked to be about 16. He was tall, thin, well muscled, and had a mop of short but unruly silver hair. His skin was pure pale white, a stark contrast from the completely black outfit he was wearing. A black long-sleeve button-down, black shirt, black pants, and black boots, as well as some stylish black sunglasses, made him look like a teenage version of a secret government agent (which wasn't far from the truth, nor why he was actually dressed that way). He sat in silence, reclining far back in the comfortable white chair, seemingly miles away from the entirely routine looking readouts on all of the screens around him.

Suddenly, he jerked slightly where he lay. Without moving further, he said, "Vera, activate the shields immediately."

"Done," spoke a completely natural sounding female voice from the walls around him. "May I ask why?"

"We will be under attack shortly," was his clipped and matter-of-fact reply.

"Oh, well if you're sure then. I really don't detect anything at all on any band of the scanners."

"Vera, when will you learn that just because you're an impressively advanced artificial intelligence in control of one of the multiverse's most sophisticated spacecraft, doesn't mean you're always right?"

"Yes Skye, always being right would be you're department."

"Now Vera, lets not get testy. Only my ability to sense danger coming is infallible. So far. What we need to do now is determine what the exact nature of this threat is. I think I sense some kind of faint thought signatures in the area. I had considered them mere echoes in the vagrancy of slipspace, but now—

Red lights and a siren going off cut off Skye in mid sentence. The lights flashed from the previously white sides of the paneling and view screens, even as Vera began to report the disturbance.

"Multiple subspace missiles inbound!" came the disembodied voice.

"ETA?"

"Between T-11 (T minus 11) and T-26 (even very accurate scanners have trouble in subspace)."

"Put the Aurora into a plasma scattering maneuver, then plot me an attack course toward the enemy."

Outside the ship, the swanlike figure swung around with surprising grace, flipping it's flaming tail toward the incoming projectiles. The missiles, which had been weaving back and forth to avoid the many destructive energy eddies that exist naturally in subspace (Big ships shrug them off, small ones get toasted), suddenly had an unavoidable wall of distorted and energized space before them, and wasted no time in disintegrating. The spontaneous destruction of their warheads sent shock waves though subspace that Skye felt strait through the shields and inertial stabilizing field. As the Aurora flipped around in a spectacularly tight turn, more projectiles suddenly appeared in subspace.

"Skye, I'm unable to locate the enemy's position. They seem to be using some kind of cloaking device," spoke a gravely concerned Vera.

"I'll locate them, just keep those missiles away from the shields. Plot as many energy diffusion paths as you have to."

That said, Skye leaned back into his chair once more. Allowing himself to relax by dint of long training, Skye extended tendrils of questing and probing thought energy out of the ship and into the swirling vortices of subspace beyond his ship's hull. Even as he did this, Vera put her enormous processing ability to the task of solving real time attack solutions that would guide energy beams though subspace distortion to hit small moving targets. A lesser computer would have been spitting error messages at the word 'go,' but Vera had the necessary data out in a few moments.

Outside the ship, the purpose of those black bands on the Aurora became readily apparent. A pair of glowing points started a few feet apart in multiple areas on each band, then moved together. When they touched, blasts of searing multicolored energy arced out from each contact point and projected into the swirling chaos. Instantly subject to the warping effect of subspace, each of the dozens of beams flashed out in a swirling knot of brilliant energy, traveling in seemingly random twists and loops. The vast majority of the beams were not even near the mark, but Vera's spectacularly complicated subspace relativity equations panned out, and the very first volley pierced each of the missiles simultaneously with death-light. This continued as more missiles appeared, and the ongoing combat exchange filled space with the convoluted flicker of stray beams and the blossoming energy disruptions of dozens of prematurely exploded warheads.

As the ship rocked with further shock waves, Skye had managed to sniff out the enemy's location by the thoughts leaking from his ship. When he tried to contact the mind and make it sorry for even attempting to attack him, he was rebuffed by a zapper—a device designed to protect one's mind by shocking attackers with psychic distortion waves.

"Vera, I'm entering his location into the computer now. Take him out, but try for disabling shots. I want him alive for interrogation," he said as he rubbed his slightly aching head.

"You know I can't promise anything. In any case, it's time to show this guy why not to mess with the IDP."

Their location locked into the computer by the ultimately precise coordinates Skye had provided her (telepathic scrying doesn't have the problem scanners face in subspace), Vera had an attack solution and two pulses of death energy off in the blink of an eye. The twirling streamers of destruction impacted with a hunk of space that was to all appearances empty, leaving behind a smoking wreck floating in the twisting ether.

"We've disabled their ship, and it's cloaking device. Scanners show life signs aboard still."

"Beautiful work Vera. Close with their ship and charge the teleporter," said a fully calm and quite pleased Skye. A moment later, Vera confirmed the teleporter ready.

"Put me on their ship, then continue to close," he told her curtly.

"You'll be out of contact with me while the subspace distortions are still as bad as they are," she warned him, but he dismissed that with a wave. "Alright then, I'll secure the wreck. Be careful."

"My safety really needn't concern you Vera," he said as he stood up. She made a small sound of uncertainty, but went ahead and energized the teleporter as soon as he signaled ready. A ring of light appeared at his waste, then split and proceeded to rise up and fall down simultaneously. Where the rings passed, Skye vanished, and when they had enveloped him completely, they vanished too.

At the same instant on the dead hulk, two rings appeared, one on the ground and one at about 6'10" above that. They moved to meat each other halfway, and where they passed Skye reappeared. As he took a moment to orient himself to the new surroundings, a strongly swung angular blade most unscrupulously came at him from behind. Sensing the attack coming even as he was rematerializing, Skye dogged easily with a precision lean to his left, then turned on his heel and launched a smart snap kick directly into the head of the being so crass as to attack a person while he or she is recovering from port-in.

A quick glance at the staggering but still dangerous foe indicated that it was a Virgelian eblimal (assassin), and Skye knew immediately that this guy was either being extremely well paid, or had some kind of a death wish. It was well know that the punishment for taking up a hit on the IDP was stasis freeze with no chance of parole. As he finished this observation, the great red gorilla of a killer let out a roar from his ape like jaw that shook his whole body right down to the thick patches of purple fur all over him.

With a leap it threw itself at Skye, attempting to cleave him in half with the forward curving axe it sported. Dodging left and right with blur-fast movements, Skye avoided each and every one of the eblimal's life ending strikes, then ducked under a kick that would have beheaded him and back flipped over the immediately following slash at his legs. Seeing his opening, Skye let loose with a strait split kick instantly as he landed after the flip, extending his right leg all the way up to his chest as he stood, catching the red ape on the side of the head. Moving too fast to see now, he took his leg strait from extension into a full roundhouse kick that smashed into the ape's stomach, pressing in deep, and knocking him out cold.

When the Virgelian was safely unconscious, Skye pulled a small device out from behind his back. It looked like a PDA, but when Skye activated it, it released a low humming sound and began to glow. Skye wasted no time in holding it up to the alien's head, and after a moment, it made a beeping sound and deactivated. On it's small screen it read "Zapper removed" in the angular IDP code language.

That little annoyance gone, Skye began the interrogation by placing his hand on the being's head. Quickly infiltrating the Virgelian's mind with his powers, he searched through every nook and cranny for who had sent this assassin after him. Slowly but surely bypassing several very good mental shields that the killer had probably bought on the black market, Skye arrived at the center of long-term memory and began to sift. Soon he found an image of him and his ship in the visual memory, grabbed on, and tracked the connections to a host of other memories that interested him. Knowing he lacked time now before Vera arrived and wanting to be finished before then, he took copies of all the relevant memories into his mind, then withdrew from the Virgelian.

The hull-shaking clang that emanated though the ship told him that Vera had maneuvered the Aurora into position to stasis freeze the drifting hulk. Satisfied that he would get to the bottom of the assassination attempt from these few memories alone, he walked over to the ship's control mechanism and began the process of figuring out where he could pug in his handheld infiltration computer (the 'PDA' from before) so it could take control of the ship's systems. As he found it and began the up-link process, he was struck by a sense of foreboding that he had learned to never ignore. Knowing then that there was more to this than met the eye, he decided it would be prudent to take extensive extra precautions. As soon as his computer had control, he began the process.

"Vera," he spoke into the ship's communicator, "cancel that stasis command. Instead I want you to run a full scan on everything in this ship."

"A full scan?" she responded with clear incredulity, "you must be kidding. We really don't have the spare power for a full scan in subspace you know."

"Vera," and now his voice held anger, "I know you're in charge of oversight on my decisions, but if you continue to question my orders, I will have you replaced."

"Chill out Skye! I was just making an observation. Sheesh...." As she spoke, there was a distinct note of nervousness in her voice. It had taken her years of AI evolution and field experience before she had gotten the honor of serving as the Aurora's AI. The position had only opened when Aurora's previous AI had been damaged beyond recovery by a system scrambler (type of Electronic Counter Measure projectile) in an epic space conflict two months back. "I'll have the scan completed in about an hour Skye."

"Good, in the meantime, I'll do my own 'scans.' Oh, and send over a brain recorder and data compilation kit (clue finding machine) as well, I don't want to take a chance of missing anything."

Some hours later, on the Aurora

After completing the full scan, the telepathic scrying, and the total data sweep, Skye had Vera put the assassin and his ship into stasis, freezing it inside a crystal with special morphic properties. It could not be released except by a beam with the proper code and waveform from an IDP 'paddy wagon,' the ships that went around collecting criminals that agents and fleet ships had captured and returning them to central processing. There criminals stand trial and perhaps face imprisonment in the Central Holding Prison (the icebox, or the can, are the more common names, due to it's stasis-frozen inmates and cylindrical shape).

Extensive analysis of the data had resulted in little, until finally Skye made a sudden and fateful breakthrough.

"AH HA!" came his excited exclamation.

"Good news I take it?" was Vera's way of asking him to spill whatever he had finally learned from all that unnecessary-seeming data.

"As I told you earlier, the memories relating to that assassin's hiring were expertly faked. I didn't even notice at my first pass, and if I hadn't stopped to get the rest of them out of his head, I would be screwed right now with nothing but false leads. Anyway, going over his brain tape revealed some extremely well-hidden gaps in his memories indicating selective mind wipe, and that job was so perfect that no one, not even me, even has a chance of recovering them. Going from there, I traced his computer's memory and the data discovered on his ship looking for some other lead. The job done on making his ship's memory match his own altered one was also A-1, but there at least there is hope of recovery. The real pay dirt though, came from the ship's communication hardware. When they were altering the ship's memory, they missed the separate communication signal log, and it has some very interesting data. Apparently one of the ship's recent communiqués was scrambled badly by time-space distortion and had had to be boosted to get through. I want you to analyze the pattern of that distortion and tell me where it had trouble."

"No problem Skye, I'll just cross reference it with my database and we'll have our location in no time. Wait please..." and Skye waited, taking a sudden interest in his pale white fingernails as the search was initiated. A few moments later, Vera came back with, "discovered: the communication was distorted around the space-time event nexus at G-11039... hey, isn't that..."

"It's Earth!" exclaimed a suddenly anxious Skye. "I don't know what the hell's going on, but there shouldn't be anyone anywhere _near_ earth capable of sending a Virgelian eblimal after me. I have a _bad_ feeling about this..."

"What I was going to say was, isn't Earth your homeworld?" broke in Vera at last.

"Huh? Well..." there was real chagrin in his voice, "yes. I suppose I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned about that more than some paltry assassination attempt. No one, and I mean NO ONE, messes with my home and gets away with it."

"So what do you want to do?"

"Set course for earth. Full speed, redline the engines if you have to, but I don't want to waste one moment."

"Uh, I hate to break it to you Skye, but after that full scan, we're just a tad low on power."

"Ah...yes. So what's the bad news?"

"I can have us there in about one day of real time, but when we get there, we'll no longer have power enough to run any but the most minor of ship's systems. Also, there are no recharging stations anywhere near Earth, and it could take weeks for the plasma cell to regenerate itself enough to send a resupply call the enormous distance to the nearest station."

"So what you're telling me is that if we want to get over there in any decent kind of time, we'll have to arrive stranded and cut off from reinforcements, as well as without any support from the Aurora during operations there?"

"That's the gist of it," and there was none of her usual playfulness in her voice now.

"Very well, make it so."

"I agree, I'll set a more sedate course and well get there in—WHAT?"

"I said proceed, speed is our greatest ally now. I don't care if we have to crash land when we get there, I want us there _yesterday_. Do you understand?" His voice was deadly serious and left no room for her to misunderstand at all.

"Yes sir, setting course now," was her resigned response.

Skye hated the thought of being stranded without support just as much as Vera, but he knew that nothing less than immediate response would satisfy the nagging foreboding he felt. Somehow, he knew that the encounter at Earth would carry multiverse-shaking importance, and that dallying would be the greatest threat of all.

"Can we at least drop out of subspace and send a communication to Operations about all this?" asked a still very concerned Vera.

"What, and loose even more power we could be using to get to earth when we create the dimension rift? I think not. Drop a subspace beacon near the wreck and let it deliver the signal to the collector drone," was Skye's somewhat annoyed answer.

"That could take months to get through!" she snapped back.

"That is a chance I'm willing to take, now get us there, no more arguments."

Knowing that she wasn't going to make anymore progress here, Vera completed the course settings and set the Aurora to max overdrive, forcing the tail out to fully twice it's previous burn length and jumping the ship smartly through slipspace.

Behind them was the stasis-frozen wreck, the subspace beacon with its incredibly important message, and an observant little robotic watcher that had so far remained undetected by Skye or Vera. Knowing where the Aurora's heading would take it, it began the process of dropping out of subspace to send a direct communication to White back on earth. Before it could pass though the rift it created in the dimensional fabric however, a final beam arced out of the Aurora and blew it to bits.

"Contact vaporized. It looked to me like an observer drone, though now there isn't enough to analyze anymore," said Vera, with pride in her tone at the power of her own scanning equipment and weapons. "_There is definitely something to be said for earning a posting on these special agent corvettes_," she thought with satisfaction, even as she considered the difficult navigational and logistic challenges that lay ahead. It was one thing for Skye to order her to plot a course to Earth and redline the engines all the way there, it was another thing entirely to pull it off.

"Good job, it would seem that someone wanted to know the outcome of this conflict. That just makes me more anxious to get to Earth. Full speed ahead."

As they passed though slipspace's swirling chaos of color and energy, the dimensional rift closed of it's own volition, and the smoking wreck of the drone was ripped into its constituent particles by the storm of disturbed energy that had still not calmed after the battle.

Preview: Up next comes a chapter of transition from my exposition to my first plot set up, building up to some truly spectacular action and drama later on. Expect some more villain and OC characterization. It's the calm before the storm as clouds of battle gather in: Prelude.

(Reviews will be answered with a personal e-mail of gratitude from me for all who say their piece and leave a return adress. If you want my effusive thanks however, you'll have to Review!)


	4. Prelude

Ch 4 intro: This chapter is really just a kind of supporting adjunct to the next one, which is one hell of an action/drama roller coaster, if I do say so myself. Read and enjoy as everyone prepares for the story to kick off in earnest.

[C-brackets indicate mental dialogue]

"_Italics are thoughts_"

"_Italics that are dialogue between people are telepathy_"

Chapter 4: Prelude

Downtown Jump City, the day after the IHOB incident

"I don't see why's it's me he thinks he can boss around," muttered Blue under his breath. The source of his consternation was the most recent task White had sent him off on. It was apparently his job to take care of the city's super-champion-toddlers, possibly the most insulting task he could conceivably have been delegated. It spoke volumes about how little White thought of Blue's unique talents, and that he considered him the least of all the conspirators, his abilities to be wasted on a job he was massively overqualified for. Of course, Blue wasn't quite sharp enough to understand all of this as such.

"Why's it me that's gotta do dis mucky job? The others didn't get no mucky murder jobs when dey wuz divvy'n up the ocil...ocslligem...oscil-li-gem-erator's work list. Me n' my muscles don't get bossed around. We's the ones that duz the bossin. We never let anybody boss us around in the old days, dat's for sure," continued Blue's nonstop, low-key, chattering as he strode slowly through the crowded streets.

"_O'course, the old days is gone for reason_," the treasonous thought crept into Blue's cheesecake-like mind as if spoken by someone else. He grimaced as bitter memories of his capture flooded back to him, galling him to no end. The IDP patrol fleet had caught up to him in subspace as he fled the scene of the Rigalop IV massacre/robbery. He hadn't necessarily meant to kill all those people, but they just didn't make vaults the way they used to. How was he supposed to know that ripping the whole thing out of the wall would bring down the office building? It didn't really matter, as he managed to drag the vault out of the rubble, then all the way to his ship, but that was the easy part of the getaway. When he tried to skip out in the new trans-dimensional space drive that shifty little lizard (Rigalopians are reptile-people) of a Rigalopian black marketeer had sold him, the IDP were on him in moments. They disabled his ship and put him in stasis before he ever had a chance to use his beautiful muscles on them. The next thing he knew he was standing trial in plasma-chains and was imprisoned without delay after a quick conviction.

"_Workin alone doesn't pay anymore I guess,_" thought a thoroughly depressed Blue as he grew ever nearer to his destination, "_'specially when yur and idjit._"

Glancing to his left for no particular reason, he saw a hugely-built, angular-jawed, vacant-looking human man staring back at him out of a mirrored window. He started slightly in surprise, knocking a man walking near him clear across the street. With a quiet "SWAP!" and a strangled scream, the man landed in an open dumpster. People around just kept on walking like they hadn't noticed anything strange.

After a moment's consternation over why he didn't look like himself, it dawned on Blue that he had been told about this already. When White had been setting him up with the gear he would need to stay under the IDP's radar (The IDP kept up extensive, dimension-wide scans for the biorhythms and power signatures of wanted criminals) he had told him that the treatment in his machine would not only alter those things the IDP searched for, but also allow him to walk in the human world "relatively inconspicuously". Blue just hadn't thought the cosmetic effect would be so...dramatic.

"I look like wunna dees apes!" he said rather loudly to himself as he stared at his reflection.

"You can say that again buddy," commented a random passerby from the crowd.

Ignoring the peanut gallery, Blue took in the rest of his new body piece by piece. His arms were as huge as ever, he was glad to note, totally ripped and easily twice the diameter and length of normal human ones. He was seven feet tall, with a huge barrel chest that supported his enormous arms, thinning out at his waist so suddenly that he looked like a triangle of pure muscle sitting on a smaller man's legs. His face didn't really suit the tastes of his species, although the long angular features of a 30-something man and a bowl-cut for his blond hair that recalled Moe from the three stooges wouldn't really have appealed to any species.

"_Oh well, I guess dis isn't gonna do itself _" thought Blue with resignation. "_White said to just begin bustin up da place and da brats would show up in no time... _(he remembers how much fun busting stuff up is) _hmm, maybe dis job'll have some perks after all._"

Grinning his stupidly malicious grin now, Blue looked around for a place to start his rampage...

Titans Tower, two minutes later

The sudden blaring of alarm sirens interrupted another otherwise peaceful afternoon in the big "T." As is usually the case with such things, the Titans were caught in various stages of whatever tasks they were up to. Robin and Beast Boy were sitting in front of the huge-screen dueling away at a fighting game, shouting taunts and threats at each other while they jerked and fidgeted in the face of the game's spectacular graphics. Starfire was standing to one side of the room, absorbed alternatively with watching the guys pummel each other and constructing something incredibly intricate-looking from string and a metal hoop. Raven nestled into a corner near the back of the room, partially protected from the incredible noise of the video game, and read from a plain brown hardback that was _probably_ poetry. Finally, Cyborg had just finished grilling himself a two-pound slab of prime sirloin and was currently seasoning it to perfection. Beast Boy had been tormenting him with condemnations intended to spoil his enjoyment, but Cyborg wasn't about to miss a second of that grease-dripping chop of heaven. (Also, Beast Boy had been discouraged from taking his eye off the game after Robin had connected with an instant kill during Beast Boy's most recent guilt-glare session against Cyborg.)

So it was that after the alarm went off, several things happened nearly simultaneously. First off, the sound startled Starfire so much that she ripped her craft project in half, ruining her first attempt at a "gebrog" (kind of woven tea-cozy) depicting the Titans all together in a smiling (except for Raven) group. Robin jumped up from the game immediately, hopping over the couch and pulling out his Titans communicator as it began to describe the problem. Beast Boy, seeing his opening, used his instant kill move on Robin's wide-open character, saving his wounded pride at the Boy Wonder's earlier cheap shot. Cyborg, a tear in his human eye, wrapped his massive, piping-hot steak in tin foil and threw it into the microwave in the hopes that the conflict would be quickly resolved. Raven merely stood silently and book-marked her spot, moving calmly and quickly toward Robin, as did the others.

"Titans, someone is busting up downtown," he said matter-of-factly, as the group gathered around him. "Let's show this guy why that's never a good idea."

High Earth Orbit, the same time.

In an astrological event that wouldn't show up on any radar, telescope, or listening device Earth could boast, the Aurora shifted out of Subspace. With some mildly flashy effects, a tear appeared in the fabric of space, obscuring the stars with a portal to a realm of chaotic color. This portal quickly spewed forth a gleaming silver space bird, it's tail of burning blue flaring brilliantly before dying out. Behind the Aurora, the rift closed of its own accord, and the craft was left floating in the void above the gleaming blue and green jewel of life that was Earth.

"Skye, we made it," said Vera, as soon as she was sure of their realspace coordinates. "So now what?"

"Now, I'm going to try and figure out why I keep getting that feeling of mine, and you are going to plot the most energy efficient way of landing us," responded a very calm and collected Skye. He was leaning far back in his chair, a clear signal to Vera that he, or at least his mind, would be someplace else very soon.

As soon as she was sure that Skye was out of body, Vera took an opportunity to do something that she had wanted to do for quite a while now.

"So, Mr. Special Agent man, how does it feel to be working with the number one graduate of the AI evolution class of 22-0485? I know, I know, I have had combat experience on ten of the fleet's best ships, and, oh yes, I was the number one candidate on the list to graduate up to the special corvette service, but please, don't let that intimidate you. No, I'm a very modest construct—everybody tells me so! In fact, I would be glad to scan the system for anomalous activity and save you the trouble... IF I HAD THE ENERYG LEFT! BUT NOOO, we had to be there YESTERDAY! I swear that if there IS trouble here and I'm damaged because YOU cut us off from backup, then I will personally haunt you until the very last universe has collapsed in on itself!"

Skye's motionless body lay still and took Vera's verbal abuse without complaint. "_Somehow, that wasn't as satisfying as I thought it would be_," mused the now silent Vera as she gazed at the young man's prone form. For some reason that she really couldn't place, even now at the edge of their patrol area, cut off from support, barely enough power left to land, unknown dangers lying in wait, she really couldn't be that angry at her new commander. Sure he was curt, and working for him was thankless, but he projected such an aura of confidence and collected competence that she couldn't help but be similarly confident with him in command.

The man was a marvel really, she decided after a moment's contemplation. He never tried to tell her what her job was, he never tired to do her tasks over again to make sure they were right, and he never ever treated her like a machine. He trusted her to do her job, and do it well—on the first try. It was actually refreshing, she supposed, to have such a trusting partner for once. Vera could only remember in horror her maiden voyage on P-R-3049 (patrol forces, recon unit, ship 3049), where the crew had actually insisted on piloting all but the simplest maneuvers MANUALLY! Attitudes like that got people, and AI's, killed, and she was really damn glad that she had a levelheaded and talented agent with her. Now, if only he'd stop being such a frost-king/asshole about his orders, she might be able to live with it (maybe even enjoy it).

Vera was brought out of her deep thoughts by Skye's next command.

"Vera," he said, having never moved from his astral-projection posture, "I have a strong feeling that I need to be in Jump City as soon as possible. I'm going to prepare an extended field kit, I need you to set up the Aurora to land in the ocean near these coordinates, divert power from all other systems—_including life support_—to charge the teleporter, then program it with these coordinates. We'll be going on foot from there."

His commands clearly listed, his coordinates double-checked, and the process of landing begun, Skye back flipped out of his fully horizontal reclining position and dashed into the next room to begin outfitting himself. While he was off the bridge, Vera went through the list of tasks and set them all up over the course of the next half instant, leaving her with some time during which her entire world was limited to the reach of the few cameras that gave her vision inside the ship (because she had deactivated the sensors and whatnot, which were her true eyes and ears). Skye's activities were obscured with him inside the ship's modest but well-rounded armory, so that was of no help in occupying her. Sitting (figuratively) there bored, she was faced by the fact that there would be nothing for her to do but maintain ship's systems and watch the plasma cell recharge for the entire next stage of operations. Then she recalled the exact wording of Skye's last comment, and suddenly she became nervous in an entirely new way.

"What _exactly_ did you mean by '_We_ will proceed on foot from there?'" she asked Skye as he walked back in from the armory.

"I meant what I said, that we'll be moving on foot after the teleporter insertion. Which reminds me, make sure you compensate for the exotic time-space distortion around here. The last thing I need is to arrive with my arm coming out of my ear."

"Compensate...?" began Vera, dumbfounded, "Skye you're talking about REMOVING ME FROM MY SHIP!"

"What?" was Skye's indifferent query, "haven't you ever been on an EVA mission?"

"EVA missions are for minor AIs! I don't leave the ship Skye! I mean, anything could happen out there! No armor, no plasma cannons, no engines, I won't have any way to protect myself!"

"Two things," he began, never changing the indifference in his tone, "first of all, you won't have those things on the ship while it's power-dead on the bottom of the ocean either. Second, you'll be riding on my implant hardware, which is surgically grafted to my nervous system, which is with me at all times, which is exactly the safest place one could possibly be." He allowed some compassion to filter into his voice before finishing with, "So chill, I need your help with data management, and at least that's something to do, as opposed to waiting on standby in what will soon be a dead ship."

Facing the fact that she couldn't deny his words and stunned by the incredible frankness and strength in her partner's voice, Vera accepted his orders in the most meaningful way she knew how. With a whirring sound and a slight pop, the solid tri-tanium (really hard, really expensive metal) cylinder that contained her core-programming chip emerged from the floor of the bridge between the command chair and the main screen. With the utmost dignity, Skye opened some pannels, entered a series of codes, and was granted a view of one of the multiverse's most advanced pieces of computer technology. The nanochip containing Vera's core program was about the length and width of a matchbox, and about the thickness of a few complex macromolecules. It's intricacies had the appearance of woven orange sugar, comprising the single most expensive and technologically advanced piece of micro-fine data storage technology ever manufactured by conscious beings. Skye could crash his ship a million times, and he still wouldn't have lost as much money's worth of IDP equipment as he would if he were to snap Vera's core chip in half. This being the case, he trusted her to do a better job of her extraction than he ever could.

Placing his head into the specially designed position in her cylinder's base, Skye lowered his jacket and pulled back his shirt's collar, exposing the pale white flesh at the base of his neck. With a disconcerting sensation, an imperceptibly small slice opened in the base of his neck between the major bones, and he was ready. Vera took one last gasp of sensation from her few active ship sensors and steeled herself against the sensory deprivation that accompanied transfer. With a supremely fast and precise motion, a tiny robotic arm removed Vera from the ship's terminal and placed her into Skye's spinal implant.

[Eeeeeeeaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!] came the stifled scream directly into Syke's mind. Knowing exactly what had happened, he took immediate action.

[VERA!] he projected into his own mind, as if her were trying to recall data from his internal computer. [VERA YOU'VE GOT TO ACCEPT THE INTEFACE!]

[NO! NO NONONONONONONONONONONON!] was the response of her mind, contracting in an eternal data loop.

[DO IT NOW!] he shouted back stubbornly, prodding her with a series of override commands until he had forced her sensory subroutines into alignment with the proper connections in his implant. As soon as sight and sound were returned to her, the scream stopped, and was replaced with a small whimpering sound. That too died out eventually, and was replaced by Vera's regular and collected self.

[What just happened?] she asked Skye with a cool anger in her tone.

[Your core Ego rejected my implant's interfaces. The feedback from the imperfect connections had you trapped for a moment. I knew what to do because the exact same thing happened the first time I tried to bring aboard Alice for her first EVA mission.]

[Alice?] questioned Vera, before she realized that that must have been Skye's previous AI support agent.

[I figured that your newer chip model wouldn't have the same problem, I'm sorry for not warning you.]

[AND YOU SHOUD BE!] came Vera's suddenly furious voice. [I can't believe you wouldn't mention something you knew might be a problem! I could have been erased!]

[I'm sorry,] was Skye's sincere apology. Vera wasn't done yet though, and sought more vents for her delayed-effect panic and anger.

[And for that matter,] she continued to rave, [when was the last time you defragmented down here? This place is a mess!]

[Umm, Sorry for that too?] was Skye's suddenly confused apology to this newest complaint. He was saved further 'internal conflict' by Vera's very responsible decision to take out the rest of her frustration by whipping his internal databanks into shape, giving him an annoying tingling sensation along his spine in the process. When she had finished a moment later, she was calm again.

[Okay, that's better,] she said in her normal tone. [Now if you don't mind, we're already halfway down to the ocean, so could we please put this whole thing behind us and move on?]

[Fine by me,] Skye responded, already doing a last check of his equipment. On an undercover operation like this, it was important to make sure that no one knew he represented the IDP. To do otherwise would mean violating intergalactic treaties that even _he_ wasn't immune to. So it was that he was equipped with a bare minimum of weaponry and gadgets. Even with only his power gauntlets, service-standard energy blaster, and palm infiltration computer, he felt more than a little conspicuous. "_Then_ _again_," he thought, "_on a planet with as many super-beings as earth, I should be able to pass them off as fancy gadgets._" All this and more he had to convince Vera of before she would consent to activating the teleporter without him wearing at least as much combat armor as her previous body, the ship, had possessed.

After the brief disorientation of being transferred though space, Skye found himself standing in a grove of trees, breathing air contaminated with all kinds of foreign odors, and loving every moment of it. It always felt good to be out in the real world after a multi-month/year stretch on sterile spacecraft and space stations. The feel of real trees around him, along with the easy secrecy, were the two reasons Skye had picked the Jump City Park as his insertion point. After taking a few deep breaths of genuine Earth air, Skye began his search for the great threat that he was quite sure had taken up residence on HIS planet. A moment's consideration set his course as directly toward wherever those explosions were coming from.

Preview: Okay ladies and gentlemen, the moment you've all been waiting for has finally arrived... almost. This next chapter is ABSOLUTLY not to be missed, as it marks this series' blast off into serious action and drama. No more building tension, no more exposition of characters, all information in the next chapter will come with a coating of destruction, violence, and a little gore too. Tune in now for: The Blue Lament of Battle.


	5. The Blue Lament of Battle

Ch 5 intro: Here it is, with no further ado. Read and enjoy.

Oh, I'm trying out something new. _Italics _are now _emphasized_ words in normal speech. That's a pretty common convention I think, and I may have used it before, but whatever. Oh, and don't forget to watch for changing point of view, denoted by a change of scene or (-character name-). Oops... I wasn't supposed to ado this time was I? Go! Read! Enjoy! Review! ... _NOW_!

Chapter 5: The Blue Lament of Battle 

Downtown Jump City, ten minutes before Skye's arrival.

Blue was happy. Something about wanton destruction of everything he could lay hands on always had a way of picking his spirits right up. Now, somewhere between the eighteenth car he had given a one-handed toss into a crowd of people, and the most recent light post he was using like a baseball bat to break skyscraper windows and sweep away the pathetic police resistance that had shown up to stop him, he had lost all of his worries in the pure joy of destruction. Gone were the concerns he had harbored about being too stupid for solo work, about not being the leader of the new syndicate, and about what his disguise made him look like. Instead everything was inundated by the red glow of berserk battle euphoria, and for the first time since busting out of prison, Blue was truly happy.

Tiring of the now bent and twisted light post, blue gave it a javelin fling into the nearest building, sending it flying through the walls, leaving a five foot wide path of destruction where it pierced. Striding toward the nearest car, he gave it a slight tap on the roof that crumpled the top into the bottom and folded it cleanly in half, so that it's front and rear bumper faced the sky. Twirling lightly on his feet, he brought his arm around in a blow that flung the wreckage high into the sky and took out a news helicopter that had gotten too close. As the fireball blossomed in the sky above him, he pounded both hands into the ground, ripping up a two-ton hunk of road about the size of a small swimming pool, throwing that mass easily into the nearest storefront. Before the five-story building could completely fall into it's neighbor, Blue had already taken a pickup truck in each massive hand and smashed them together over his head at high speed. The fused hunk of metal made the perfect projectile, and he wasted no time in giving it an overhand toss far into the quickly retreating mass of people that were fleeing his rampage. The twisting and skipping hunk of steel hopped against the road once, twice, then a third time before cart-wheeling directly at a clump of people. Disappointingly for Blue, a blast of green light arced in out of nowhere, describing a curved path that intercepted his two-car meat grinder in mid air and sent hunks of molten steel every which way _except_ toward the people.

Slightly annoyed at the anti-climax, Blue turned to see where this opposition was coming from. Gazing into the smoke of his destruction, he spotted five figures standing close by and ready to fight. Deciding that he should make the most of having spotting them through the smoke _before _it could clear and give them a chance to deliver a few smart-ass lines, Blue grabbed a sedan and whipped it around like a boomerang, sending it at the Titans faster than the eyes could follow. The figures in the smoke scattered easily around the high-speed projectile, and someone shouted "TITANS, GO!" loudly enough for him to hear it over the raging fires behind him.

Before anything else could happen, a figure came flipping toward him out of the smoke. Even as this registered, a number of flying objects pummeled Blue with explosions galore. Surprised but not shaken, he took the explosions like a champ, and when the figure's acrobatic advance came to a head with a flying leap of red and green blur, clearly aimed for his head, his enormous paw was already in position to deliver a smack of epic proportions. Connecting with a sickening 'TWAP,' Blue sent this first assailant flying toward a nearby building, directly for it's seventh floor. "_One down_," he thought with satisfaction, as the lithe form paid a steep price in pain for thinking even powerful explosives could disorient _him_.

The victory was cut short by the interdiction of a huge green rhino's enormous horn into Blue's lower ribcage. Never stunned for a moment, Blue flipped around in mid air, landed with his hands in the pavement, and with a lighting-fast upward pull on the ground, had a car-sized hunk of black road flying towards the still-charging rhino before it could make another four steps from where it had struck him. The lump of rock sent the rhino flying backward, and it's fate was lost to Blue as another challenger made his presence known with a blast of blue sonic energy into his stomach.

Even as he staggered from the first shot, another two had hit each of his shoulders, blowing him backward and quickly destroying his balance. The advancing figure of a man/machine done up in blue circuits and armor continued to blast him again and again, from closer and closer, until it stood over him and held him to the ground with a constant stream of destructive energy pressing into his chest.

"Fallen and you can't get up, huh buddy?" said the bald cyborg as he pinned Blue to the ground. Not rising to the taunt in the least, Blue reached out and grabbed a nearby metal construction I-beam that had fallen from a crumbling building and used it one handed to swat his metallic opponent to the side. The resounding clang of unbendable metal meeting unbustable armor at high speed echoed thorough the streets of Jump City, and when the dust cleared, Cyborg lay pressed two inches into a building's wall with a huge dent in his lower chest armor. Closing in for a punch that would have crushed Cyborg's skull and brought the whole building down around his target, Blue was interrupted once more.

In mid stride he was caught between the rapid advance of two huge pieces of blackly glowing building debris closing in from each side with disgusting force. The resulting stone sandwich gave him more than enough to think about, as the sharp pain from the crushing force stoked his rage-fueled strength even further. Flexing his spectacular muscles, Blue began to force the two boulders apart, even as they continued to drag him further into the air. Just as he was about to release himself from the black stone grip, a neutral female voice shouted "NOW!" and the world was reoriented once again as a searing burn arced down his side and carried him free of the boulders, depositing him instead on some high story of an already-crumbling office building. When the green haze cleared from his eyes, Blue was falling quickly toward the ground, impacting with a crash that fractured the road for twenty feet in every direction. Yanking himself up with the speed that anyone who hadn't been hurt at all would have, he was able to see the next attack coming.

A purple, orange, and red streak of speeding woman came arcing down at him from his direct front, gaining a green glow as it reached ground level. A series of staccato green blasts rushed toward him and impacted with searing pain, but once again failed to prevent his inspired counter attack. With spectacular timing, he pounded his fist onto the broken ground and caught the red-haired slip of a girl with a piece of stone that catapulted up at the impact, sending her flying off balance toward him. Bringing his left fist around in a haymaker's arc from right to left, he landed a full force blow against the girl's back that flung her through the air like a sack of sand. As her form skipped and rolled limply away in the distance where she had finally landed, Blue lamented for his stinging fist. Hitting the girl had been like punching triple-plated steel, and while he was used to it, he hadn't been expecting it.

Exhilaration of victory flooded Blue's body then as he searched for his next victim among the building dust and oily black smoke. The kiddies were putting up quite a bit more of a fight than he had expected, and the excitement of facing a new challenge had Blue high with mindless happiness that mingled freely with his unstoppable rage.

His next opponent wasted no time in making her own next move though, so his search was cut short by several watermelon-sized rocks hitting him in the back with the force of cannonballs. As he struggled to stand, more and more shattered against his muscular back, attempting to drive him into the ground. His amazing strength shined though as he fought his way to his feet, only to discover that the barrage of stone had mysteriously stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The respite was a ruse, he discovered, when a hunk of building foundation the size of a small skate park came falling quickly towards him from above. He barely had time to get his hands up and catch the enormous weight (let's say... 5 tons?) before it could crush him.

After nearly breaking everything he had absorbing the shock of the concrete island's fall, Blue was left with the twin dilemmas of what to do with it now and how to stop the ground from crumbling beneath his feet, which was exactly what he managed by lifting it up two inches and bringing it back down on his neck. With a horrifying crackling noise, the massive artificial stone split down the middle, he allowing a piece to fall to either side of him, taking out another building that had thus far escaped damage somehow.

Turning to face his latest opponent, he found her keeled over and breathing heavily as she tried to recover from the massive exertion that chucking that hunk of stone at him no doubt involved. When she saw him standing there, clearly unharmed, her eyes widened in amazement, and she somehow managed to pull herself together for another attack. Before Blue could charge her, she shouted three words he couldn't quite make out, and suddenly huge swirls of white-edged black energy enveloped her, grew incredibly large, and flew directly at him. He leapt to the side, but the energy tracked him down and wrapped him up, even as he dragged himself toward the dark girl. When the energy had fully enveloped him, he was only a few feet away from his target, who was standing her ground fearlessly, hands pressed to her head in concentration, a look of desperate determination on her face. Picking him up and suspending him in the air, she too floated upward to be level with him, just out of his flailing reach.

"You've caused enough commotion for one day, and now its time for you to pay for hurting my friends," she said in a tired, calmly indifferent voice with only the slightest edge of submerged anger.

"DO YOU REALLY THINK DIS WILL HOLD _ME_?" spat back Blue, his eyes fairly glowing with rage. Making good on his threat, he whipped his arms out to his sides and brought them together again with a resounding CLAP! The force of the impact created a shockwave that flicked Raven away like a shot, propelling her at high speed into the ground some distance away. As he righted himself after his own subsequent impact with the earth, he began to look around, searching for the first defeated enemy he would finish off.

(Robin)

"_This hasn't been going well_," thought Robin as he gripped his aching side. Experience told him that he had broken at least two ribs when that behemoth had swatted him away, and if Starfire hadn't caught him before he hit that building, it would have been _much_ worse. "_No...Starfire..._" he thought, an even greater pain gripping his heart as he remembered watching helplessly as she was clobbered as well. Now that he had recovered enough of his senses to walk again, it was time for him to get some revenge.

"Beast Boy, it's time to Joust," he said, feeling a familiar presence staggering up behind him.

"Dude, we're both beaten up Robin, we need to get the others and come up with a plan," was the green kid's pleading response. "I just managed to get out from under that rock by becoming a mouse, and you've seen better days too by the look of it."

"There's no time for that!" was the leader's heated retort, as he swung his hand through the air in frustration. "Everyone else has _already_ been beaten, if we try to retreat now, there won't be anything to stop him from hurting more innocent people." The deep pain in his voice spoke not only of shattered bones and internal bleeding, but also of injuries to his pride, sense of duty, and confidence, a message not missed by Beast Boy.

"Okay Robin, I'm behind you, but I don't really think a guy who can shrug off a five ton hunk of concrete--literally!--is going to be bothered too much by a joust," he warned, as he prepared to change into a horse.

"Noted, and that's why it's going to be a joust with some explosive power behind it, right Cyborg?" spoke Robin with a smirk, as his heavy metal friend also approached to regroup.

"You got that right, no one messes up my body and gets away without some SERIOUS PAIN!" added Cyborg, as he transformed his hand into a cannon and rubbed the dented area of his chest. He winced as several loose wires sparked and hissed within him, but the look of burning determination never left his face.

"So dat's where you guys was hide'n eh?" came their opponent's deep and deeply stupid voice from their right. Snapping around with an expression of pure rage, Robin shouted "TITANS GO!" and the three scattered once more. Running as fast as he could with the sharp pain in his chest, Robin circumvented the debris of several fallen buildings, meeting up with Beast Boy out of the villain's sight. Leaping nimbly into the air, Robin landed on Beast Boy's horse form, and the two took off at a gallop toward the blond bruiser that had so far proven indestructible. As they rounded the first lump of demolished building, they reached full speed and spotted their opponent tangling with Cyborg. The two had been exchanging grievous super-strong blows, as evidenced from another dent in Cyborg's armor and a new crater where the muscle-bound lout had no doubt been flung by a Cyborg shoulder tackle. Another huge punch from their opponent sent Cyborg flying into a nearby pile of stone, but not before he had removed a large, thick, disc of some kind from a compartment in his back and sent it flying toward Robin with a quick fling.

Catching the disk, Robin attached it to one of his plasma explosives and loaded the deadly payload to the front of his metal fighting staff, extending it and aiming it for the bruiser's head in the few seconds between his nice catch and the sudden jarring impact of two huge masses. The detonation of his plasma bomb an instant before Cyborg's armor-piercing mine directed the twin blasts entirely toward the behemoth's ugly mug and awful haircut, launching him away as he screamed in pain and rage, even as Robin hopped off of Beast Boy and the two rushed to where the flying heap of muscles had landed.

When they arrived it was to find not a nearly broken foe ready to be finished off and locked up, but a raging and flailing knot of muscular fury gripping his sizzling face and thankfully bald head with both hands. As Robin tried to launch an attack at the wounded beast's legs, he was knocked away painfully by a huge elbow's random spasm. Recovering from the stinging blow, he saw much the same thing happen to Beast Boy's gorilla form, though he at least managed to get one good ape punch in before hand. Then, just when Robin thought they might be wearing down this terrible opponent, a directed smack arced out at Beast Boy as he tried to give the gorilla punch another go, smashing the green ape over the nearest pile of stone and out of sight. Slowly now, his flailing stopped and he pried his other hand from his face.

"Who _is_ this guy?" asked Robin in abject horror, as he watched what seemed to be pieces of melted flesh cling to the man's hand as he pulled it away. The melted mess that covered the muscleman's mug was hideous beyond reason, with runny and dripping bits flowing near eyes that appeared to be bulging from the skull.

"YOU BUSTED MY MASK!" shouted the vision of horror cryptically, "NOW YOU'RE GONNA PAY!"

With that bellow he launched a new assault at Robin, charging forward and attempting to crush him into the ground with a series of overhand smacks. Robin, though injured and mildly nauseated, was still agile enough to dodge the suddenly clumsy blows of his partially blinded opponent. Searching for an opening, he dashed away and to one side, and soon he was no longer pursued. Looking back to see why he had lost the enraged brute, his heart almost stopped...

The Battle Zone, a few minutes earlier

Raven had pulled herself out of the rubble she had landed in only with great difficulty. Having nearly exhausted her power trying to contain the brute's rampage, she lay almost helpless amid the remains of old buildings that had never stood a chance in this clash. Hearing a small sound behind her, she turned to see that her decent had by chance landed her near Starfire's prone form. Staggering slowly to her still friend, her heart aching more with every step, Raven felt her cool persona melting in the face of the ultimate injustice. Before her lay happiness incarnate, silenced. With trickles of her blood blending morbidly with her red hair, Starfire lay broken upon the ground. Blood and more blood leaked from her ears and nose, as well as from dozens of small cuts on her arms and legs, all of which were dwarfed by a bleeding gash across her exposed midriff.

"No...not you..." whispered a horrified Raven, the raw emotion she felt mysteriously absent from her voice, as if her long practice at hiding what she felt prevented her from expressing it openly now, when it was truly necessary. Eyes that had not felt the wetness of tears for longer than she could remember welled slowly as she gazed at her quiet friend, her consciousness contracting in panic so extreme that she missed even the enormous explosion that took place not far from her.

Just as it seemed the stress of what she felt would rupture her consciousness and spread her sanity on the winds, her panic-heightened senses detected a faint glimmering of hope. The slightest breath stirred Starfire's otherwise deathly still form, and suddenly a new thought consumed Raven's mind.

"Alive..." she whispered weakly, her mind latching onto the thought like a steel trap. Suddenly the world seemed to get light again where before it was dark, and Raven's panic was instantly replaced by a sharp dread and iron determination. For she still dreaded that her friend might slip away, while she was determined that as long as she still drew breath, that wouldn't happen. An unignoreable rumbling in the ground interrupted her reverie of emotion at this point, and when she turned her gaze toward the source, she was faced with the first, and possibly the last, test of her determination.

The sight that greeted her gaze was a disfigured giant chasing Robin through the rubble, trying intermittently to smash the handsome hero into bird jelly. Suddenly Robin dogged to one side, and the giant's gaze shifted inexorably from him to the two girls where they lay. As the danger made itself clear to Raven's fatigued mind, time seemed to slow with the dread realization. Pain, fear, and fatigue all forgotten, Raven began her chant, having never had more need of her demonic father's black gift.

"Azarath..." she began the familiar mantra, arriving at a state of total calm that had nothing to do with her training and everything to do with impending death. She felt as if she had all the time in the world to finish, to throw up her hands and stop the death of her friend and herself. The time dilation was startling, and she used it to her advantage as she continued.

"Metrion..." she spoke next, simultaneously reaching down to the deepest depths of her soul, scrounging up every reserve of power, every drop of black energy contained within her. There was no point in saving any of it for later, for if this failed, there would never be another later. Using every ounce of her focus, she pulled forth power she didn't know she had, wrenching it out to serve as the last barrier between her and her friend, and the impending death that charged ever so quickly nearer.

"ZINTHOS!" she shouted, all the black power she had accumulated leaping from her eyes and hands as she willed the air around her to solidify. A black dome of rigid air that fairly buzzed with the force of her spirit sprung into existence between her and the charging beast of muscle, mere instants before his arms flashed forward in twin blurs of death.

At this moment, the fateful meeting of irresistible force and immoveable object, the strongman's unnatural ability finally met its match, and his spectacular blow rebounded with the sound of a gong. A twin punch carrying enough force to crush a diamond to dust, knock over a skyscraper, or relocate a goodly portion of mountain knows no true match however, and as the tolling sound died away, Raven's black dome cracked and shattered, even as the raging attacker's arms were thrown backward by the force of the rebound and he had to stagger to stay on his feet.

For Raven, time came back, and she was greeted by a deafening tone and the sound of her shield breaking. Everything she had left had gone into the shield, and even that hadn't been enough. As her vision began to fade with her consciousness, she saw the foe bent on her destruction recover his balance where he stood above her, raise his arms, and grin with his disfigured visage as he prepared for a new deathblow. Explosions rocked off his back as thrown weapons tried valiantly to distract him, but with the taste of blood in his mouth, the behemoth was not even shaken. The last thing she saw before she lost consciousness was a bright light, then there was only the softly accepting blackness.

(Robin)

"NOOOO!" screamed Robin as he realized beyond doubt that nothing he could do would save his friends from being crushed mercilessly. He had already emptied his utility belt into the villain's back but nothing would shake the murderous freak from its homicidal path. Robin's experiences with Raven and Starfire flashed before his eyes as he dashed toward them in vain, taunting him with memories of the good and bad times they had been through together. Now mysterious, reliable Raven and kind, beautiful Starfire would be stolen from him, and the mere thought of it threatened to bring his world crashing down. Before he could even get halfway to them, he could see the murderous man's massive fists begin their downward decent, and it seemed all hope was lost.

With a flash of brilliant silver light, a beam of hot crackling energy lashed out from somewhere on his right, dazzling his eyes as it struck the massive man in his upper shoulder, knocking him sideways as the flash of heat caused a minor explosion of air. Two more beams flashed out in successive bright righteousness, hitting him even as he twisted through the air and knocking the giant back a few more feet with each melting impact. When Robin's stunned vision cleared, the assailant was trying to drag himself out of a ditch fifteen feet from the two unconscious girls, huge black burns etched onto his side. Far too worried about his friends, he wasted no time wondering at his spectacular luck and ran towards his fallen comrades.

Up close, their state was worse than he could ever have imagined. Star's wounds seemed almost surely fatal, and Raven would not be waking any time soon. With the sound of the behemoth bellowing his rage to the world as he crawled up to full stature and searched for the source of his weeping wounds, Robin was left sadly short of options. Moving Starfire would kill her, no doubt, and he refused to take Raven and leave Star for dead, it wasn't in him and Raven would never forgive him anyway. Decided, he stood, extended his metal staff, and took up a defensive stance (slightly stooping over his bad ribs), prepared to sell his life dearly for his friends. Idly he wondered how Beast Boy and Cyborg were doing, and if they would be able to save the girls if he couldn't, but then the muscleman had focused his rage and with two huge strides was upon Robin once more.

Dodging the man's first hasty swing with a quick hop, Robin landed on his massively muscled shoulders and struck down onto his head with the staff. Leaping away before another swing could take him apart, Robin flipped in mid air and landed in a crouch behind him, just in time for a high speed fist to come swirling at his head as the man turned. Leaning back on his heels, Robin dogged a clipping blow that would have crushed his skull, then lashed forward with a straight pole to the killer's kneecap that would have crippled a normal man. Before the disfigured man could retaliate, Robin was on the move once more, rolling between the large arch of the man's legs and trying to come up with a blow to the man's spine, only to find himself in searing pain. The roll had pinched his ribs together, dislocating one of the broken prongs into his internal organs and causing a pain so intense it threatened to white out his consciousness. Holding on, but just barely, he looked up just in time to see a huge foot right above his head.

"I've failed—"was all he could think, before it came rushing toward him...

A few minutes earlier, Skye's arrival.

After the next set of explosions had shaken the ground and the sky began to darken with clouds of black smoke and dust, Skye was certain of his destination. And of course, if he needed further directions, he could also have followed the opposite path of the horde of people fleeing in panic. Pushing through the people was getting him nowhere fast, as the tide of flesh buffeted him backward just as quickly as he pressed forward. Deciding that haste was more important than ethics for the time being, he exerted a suggestive mental force on everyone in the mob and made them think a two-foot area around him was an immovable object they had to stream around. The crowd parted miraculously, with some people seeming to become squeezed against the blank air and struggling not to be crushed against the imaginary wall in the press of the masses. He was moving forward almost as quickly as if there was no crowd at all then, running through the living sea as it parted like butter before a hot knife, dashing toward the sound of destruction and battle.

Coming out of the far side of the fleeing mass came as a sudden shock, the people were simply there and then not, but Skye took the opportunity to pour on the speed. Sweat dripping down his alabaster skin, he wiped his forehead with his black button-down's long sleeve, it's unbuttoned sides flapping behind him as he speed along. The weapons he had strapped under the back of his button down glinted silver in the afternoon sunlight, jingling slightly despite their tight harnesses being attached securely to his back and waist.

The next obstacle to try and impede his progress was a group of police and firefighters seeking to stop fires from spreading indiscriminately through the residential buildings near the battle. These valliant men and women were braving stray boulders, laser beams, collapsing buildings, and thrown cars to ensure that the people fleeing to safety would have homes to come back to.

"We can leave that freak to the Titans people!" shouted a fire chief as his forces marshaled hoses, axes, and extinguisher-bots against the all consuming flames, "But they need us to stop these fires, and we don't want to let them down, so GET A MOVE ON!"

Inspired despite himself, he knew that these noble people would be forced to try and warn him away, or otherwise slow him down, so he used another telepathic compulsion to ensure that they never noticed his passing at all.

[Who were those people?] asked Vera, who monitored all he saw and heard through his implant.

[They were firefighters trying to save people's homes,] responded Skye, almost glad for something to distract him from the pain of keeping up a flat out sprint for five city blocks.

[What—you mean people do that manually here?] Vera asked, incredulous.

[Robots here aren't advanced enough to do it alone yet,] said Skye, remembering the most recent technology report he had had to read so he'd know these things about a homeworld he never spent time on.

[Well then, I'll bet they must get a fat salary for work like that,] was Vera's next supposition. She was clearly trying to give him just the distraction he needed to keep pushing his limits.

[Not really. In fact, many do it for free, and those who do it for a living really aren't paid all that well,] Skye informed her regretfully.

[Skye,] said Vera, with an admonitory tone, [you come from a really screwed up planet.]

[I know,] was his slightly sad answer.

There was no more time for talking then, because as Skye fairly slid around the next turn, a scene of incredible destruction greeted him. The toppled remains of buildings lay strewn over broken streets. Piles of rubble taller than the light posts (most of which were broken anyway) blocked the sidewalks, and steam vented from manholes that had long been missing their covers. The twisted remains of automobiles dotted the other wreckage, seemingly at random, with some on top of destroyed buildings and others barely sticking out of holes opened in the street to the sewer below.

Wasting not a single moment, Skye scaled the nearest gutted building with a series of agile leaps up a crumbling pile of wreckage, arriving at a vantage point that overlooked the entire battle zone. Sensing only a handful of thought-emitting minds, Skye turned toward the most active, a male one shouting despairing thoughts into the ether so loudly that Skye didn't even need to try and hear them. Zeroing in on these thoughts, he gazed into a screen of obscuring smoke and searched for the source.

With a gust of wind, the smoke cleared for an instant, and that was all Skye needed to pull a split second draw and have off three disgustingly accurate laser beams from his service blaster. When he looked to see what he had hit with his instinctive snapshot, he saw a hugely musclebound figure lying in a ditch, not far from where two prone forms and one running from were also present. Then the smoke obscured the scene again, and Skye cursed as he leapt over the side of the building he had shot from. Sliding down the side of the building by pressing his feet and arm against it, he quickly switched over to a mysteriously undamaged lamppost half way, and then was on the ground in the next moment. Kicking it into high gear again, he opened up every minute speck of speed he possessed as he raced through a maze of rubble toward his opponent.

Desperately he tried to contact the mind of the being that had managed to shrug off three shots from his laser blaster, seeking to disable the behemoth as quickly as possible and help out the incredible warriors that had opposed him so far. As he searched, he located the mind of the one young fighter that was still engaging him, and from there tracked down a mind that he wasn't even sure could be considered a mind.

This mind floated on a film of pure rage so blind and unthinking that Skye was left with no route to infiltrate and debilitate it. The rage acted more effectively than even a really good mind shield by removing the passages of the mind through which a telepath could enter, making any contact with the mind (safe contact anyway) impossible. Of course, the IDP had trained Skye's powers to a truly impressive extent, and had not ignored some of his more sinister latent talents...

"_God I hate using this move,_" he thought to himself as he mounted the final mound of debris between him and the raging battle before him. Reaching the top, he leapt forward, drawing his power gauntlets from under his button-down in a swift movement of his arms behinds his back, activating them as he pressed the ground with his hands.

The gauntlets themselves were a set of two intricate silver mesh gloves with enormous red gems set into the back of the hands. As soon as Skye channeled his telepathic powers into them, the rubies vented streamers of white light that matched his skin, the ribbons quickly bundling and wrapping around his forearm to form a visible shell around the silver mesh that was the true form of the guantlet. As his telepathic powers pulsed through the specially reactive gems and metal, the encasing white light wrapped around his arms formed two wickedly spiked bracers. The twin gloves of light were Skye's weapons of choice, giving him a wide range of new options for his mental powers, as well as a supernatural strength.

The Gauntlets activated in the flashing instant it took Skye to bend his arms and aim his next attack. Luckily, the brute was on one foot, like he was about to stomp on something, because this meant he didn't even begin to have enough balance to stop Skye's attack. In a blur of spinning motion and white light, Skye catapulted himself out of the handstand and directly into the brute's face, corkscrewing through the air to maximize his impact. The shock from his feet contacting the melted scars of the killer's face was so strong it threatened to break his ankles, knees, and hips all at once, but the fiend's fortunate lack of footing saved Skye's bones, and the giant went toppling over as Skye completed an acrobatic flip and landed on his feet in a crouch.

Facing the fallen, but far, far from defeated enemy, he sprung forward, preparing to use the only power he regretted being born with. Clearing his mind for the coming onslaught, he stretched out and gripped onto the brute's head before he could begin to stand. With a deep breath and an exertion of malicious power, he began the draining...

(Robin)

Robin was more than a little stunned when instead of the massive foot advancing to crush his skull, grinding it into the rubble with what he could only imagine would be a sickening wet sound, an entirely different sound of impact filled his ears. With a thud that Robin recognized as the contact of boot and head (he knew it well) the foot instead began to recede, and the ground shook as the titanic brute fell backward. At an utter loss for words, thoughts, and actions, Robin continued to stare vacantly at where the foot had been a moment ago.

With a burning pain, the plight of his friends snapped his mind back into focus, and he flipped up to his feet just in time to see a figure he didn't recognize leap forward and grip onto the head of their momentarily disoriented opponent with two glowing white hands. As he watched in fascination, a wave of energy blasted out of the gauntlets at the very instant of contact, the white flash of light pushing him slightly before passing. After a moment of calm, a strange light enveloped the brute's body, then began flowing up his prone form and into the mysterious stranger. More and more light came from his body, and more and more of it took the quick trip into the Titans' rescuer, when suddenly the brute began to scream, thrash, and flail on the ground.

The scream was earsplitting and soul wrenching, seeming to suck the support right out from Robin's legs with it's piercing, terrifying intensity. The rabid thrashing shook the ground, pulverizing stone to dust and cracking the earth, but still the stranger held on, refusing to stop the terrifying process of whatever it was that he was doing. Just when Robin thought it couldn't get any weirder, the stranger's eyes began to emit a frightening red glow that reached out from behind his sunglasses and painted the area in front of his face with bloody color.

The more red light that leapt from the stranger's eyes, the less the brute thrashed, until his movements slowed down to virtually nothing. The light continued to flow however, and just a Robin began to move from fascinated to concerned, the stranger spoke.

"Knock him out," he said, in a voice that sounded carefully controlled against yelling or crying or something.

"What?" Robin asked, unable to comprehend exactly what was going on, and understandably reluctant to follow such a sudden order from a stranger, even one that had saved him (and presumably the girls moments ago).

"I...can't...stop...draining...until...the...bastard...blacks...out..." he struggled to say, as if he were in great pain or was having trouble staying conscious. As Robin looked on, he slowly crawled up onto his knees (he had been lying prone during the draining) shaking uncontrollably along the length of his body. As he saw this shaking, Robin understood that whatever it was the stranger was doing, it caused him great distress, and the quivering of a person that had saved his life was all it took to motivate Robin to action. Unsure still of just how effective he could be, he moved to attack.

With a flying leap, Robin shot into the air, flipped twice, then brought all the weight of his body and the force gained by spinning down onto the tip of his staff, crushing it into the brute's fabulously muscled stomach. Having braced himself for this blow to bounce off as all his past ones had, he was shocked when his staff not only made a spectacular hit into the brute's stomach, but sunk in deep and pressed into the killer's vitals. With a whimper of air being pressed from his lungs, the villain passed from consciousness at last.

When he landed after the blow, Robin admired his handy work, and then turned to confront the stranger only to find that the young man had retreated from the now unconscious brute already. His distress had not been quieted by victory, and even now he shook with some unknowable terror, pain, or other mysterious infliction. Even as he watched, the black-clad man fell to his knees and started groaning low, pained words to himself that Robin couldn't quite make out. When he tried to walk up and see if he could help, or get help for, the guy that had saved the life of him and all his friends, a snarling shout warned him away.

(Skye)

Skye was rippling with energy that threatened to tear him apart. The brute had been filled with rage, so Skye had used the psychic draining to empty him of that rage and open a path for a more conventional attack. However, the instant the draining began, something whet wrong, and instead of sucking out the rage and containing it within his own controlled mind as he had done many times before, with many different emotions and energies, Skye had tapped directly into the villains core of power and began to drain that instead.

"_Some kind...of connection...between his rage and his power?_" thought Skye as he gripped his chest with his gauntleted hands and tried to ignore the feeling of being torn in two. He had managed to divert from pure power to power and rage after adjusting, but tampering with the connection to his foe's spirit had also been a mistake, trapping him for the duration of the draining without the escape route his original piercing strike into the brute's soul had left. If it hadn't been for that fighter's intervention, his head would almost certainly have detonated from the energy filling it so spectacularly overfull.

[Skye, I don't know what you just did, but your vitals are spiking! Chill out before this kills you!] shouted Vera into his mind, as confused by Skye's reaction as she was by the readings all his vital signs were returning. By all rights he should have died five times already, considering his pulse and blood pressure alone, and yet he still stood.

"I...can't...hold it in," he gasped to no one in particular, as the power racing around inside him searched desperately for an exit. It was like a snake of pure burning magma writhing within him, and even as he thought this, the rage he had sucked up also made its presence known.

With a resounding snap of power, the internal shields that had been holding back the brute's rage popped, Syke having lost concentration on them as he tried to deal with an overflux of power splitting him open. Combining instantly with it's familiar friend the power, the rage exploded forth, knocking down all of Skye's internal barriers and inundating his mind with a desire to kill, destroy, maim, eradicate, and otherwise make others suffer.

"AAAHAHHHAHHAHGHGHHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHHHHGG," his mixed bellow of fury and pain fairly wrenched from his lungs, knocking back everything around him with a simultaneous burst of telepathic energy so powerful it could be felt by the body as well as the mind. Though he barely noticed, the young man that had defeated the brute with his help was thrown back, gripping his head in pain, even as the last vestige of Skye's own consciousness snapped forth with his last chance of survival.

Throwing up his hand, he directed all that fury and rage into his gauntlet, where it was happy to combine with the psychic amplifying gem, expand spectacularly, and exit as it had desired so forcefully to do. With a blinding flash, the woven silver ribbons of the gauntlet unraveled, ballooned outward, then re-formed into a massive beast's head that was several times the size of Skye's whole body. The woven light molded into a fang-filled jaw to dwarf a Tyrannosaurus's, sprouted eight-foot horns that phased mystically through the ground they dug into, and opened slanting, red eyes. This light beast then opened its jaws and from its throat came a quickly growing red glow, building in the throat as the same glow died in Skye's eyes.

After a moment of complete calm, where neither the slightest pebble nor the most sweeping gust of wind dared move a single molecule, Skye vented all the pent up energy in one massive blast. Like dragon's fire, a red beam stretched into the sky from the light beast's open maw, starting in an infinitely small point just outside the parted teeth, then swirling out cone-like to a twenty-foot diameter of roiling, twisting, knotting red and white energy emptying itself against the afternoon sky. All around, wind whipped into gale force, fires leapt higher, and the smoke and dust cleared away from the chaotic energy like a billion brown and black insects fleeing a flame's heat. It's sound was the most terrible rushing and roaring of wind and stone that could possibly be imagined, blanking out all other sound in it's furious howl. The pillar rushed up and up, like flames eager to consume the stars, flashing out to touch the cold infinity of space with hot rage and glaring power, never to return to containment of mind, soul, or flesh.

And within the pillar of undiluted destructive force, an image could be seen by any brave enough to stare at its terrible visage. A face was there, one covered in stone-like angular lumps and decorated with one huge eye with a creamy blue iris. The face's mouth was twisted in a grimace of fury, and it opened its mouth to vent silent screams of rage to the sky, even as it was carried away in the destructive energy that contained it. At last though, both the image and the pillar of energy died away to nothing, the light beast unraveled down to the now quiet silver gauntlets, and Skye was left in the suddenly silent aftermath of battle, bathed in bright sun on a Thursday afternoon.

Dropping to his knees, Skye felt empty and disoriented. Contributing to these feelings were the facts that he had used most of his own power to direct the rage out, his body was badly damaged by the stress to his system, and there was a female voice in his head nagging him about some kind of known criminal who's image she had spotted in the explosion of energy. Looking to his side, he noticed the young man clad in the red and green combat suit staring with wide (masked) eyes and a stunned expression directly back at him. To complete the absurdity of the moment, the brute, who had lain still between Skye and the young fighter since the draining, vanished from where he lay with a flash and a rush of wind.

If possible, the fighter's (still masked) eyes grew even a little wider, his gaze sliding down to where the brute had been, then back up to Skye with a self evident question. The lightheadedness Skye couldn't fight off compelling him to answer, he managed to mumble, "I didn't do that one," and give a slight shrug.

"_The shrug was mistake_," he thought mirthlessly when a wave of unbearable pain flashed through every muscle that had moved. The white heat of pain blanked out that annoying female voice, which had been yelling about teleporters indicating an advanced enemy presence, then blanked out everything else as well. With a slight thud then, Skye fell forward on his face and passed out.

(Robin)

Left more than a little shell shocked, it took the collapse of the Titans' rescuer to snap Robin back into a functioning frame of mind. Immediately following that snap was a rush of the panic, fears, and heartache that had taken a little vacation while confusion, shock, and awe had hijacked his brain.

"STARFIRE!" he shouted as the memory of her bloody, still body came back with a crackle of absolute horror. Turning on his heel, he flipped out his communicator and called up the EMS teams. They were going to need a lot of ambulances.

Preview: WHOAH! Now was that great or what? How can I possibly top this one? You'll just have to wait and see I'm afraid. In the next chapter we'll learn how everything turned out once the dust settled, so unless you're some kind of heartless prick, I'm sure you'll want to know who survives, who doesn't (it's a possibility!), and all about how Blue's defeat alters the situation. Also be prepared for another big dose of sci-fi, with Skye's powers revealing a new front. Don't miss one heart-wrenching second of: Aftermath.


	6. Aftermath

Intro: Get ready for a wild emotional ride. Well, maybe not all that, but I thought it was pretty dramatic. I always felt Robin was the one most likely to kill himself for his friends, or at least tied with Raven for that position, and here we have an interesting little take on that aspect of his personality. Don't quit before the end, otherwise you won't know if it's a happy one or not. Finally, I know that the Titan's auras were shown off in the "Switched" episode, but I felt those were totally unimaginative, so I wrote them my own way.

Chapter 6: Aftermath

When the search teams had finished going through the rubble of this most recent attack on the city, the toll turned out to be surprisingly light—not that that mitigated the absolute tragedy of the whole messed up situation. The civilian body count came out to a mere twenty people, four people crewing the news helicopter (including one famous reporter that would be getting quite a sendoff), eight people that had failed to heed the police's attempts to evacuate the monster-man's path, and eight more people that had been trapped in the building-to-building fires. In their attempt to delay the homicidal villain, nine police officers were killed, and another two firefighters died heroically attempting to rescue the group of eight trapped in the burning building. Due to the heroic police action and the timely arrival of the Titans, damage was largely limited to property, of which the better part of an old residential block was now gone. Homelessness would be rampant until the insurance companies could come out to check and double check the claims filed for collection on the Super Villain v. Superhero damage policy that everyone in Jump City, Gotham, and Metropolis was crazy to go without, but it was pretty clear cut, and everyone would likely be reimbursed for their cars and homes. In the meantime, the American Red Cross, as well as several disaster-relief charities and religious groups were on the scene to erect temporary shelters and provide food, blankets, and a helping hand.

The official story was that a super-powered man, fueled by homicidal mania with no known cause, had lost his head and attempted to kill everything around him. The Titans stopped him, but not before causing the city's protectors serious injuries, injuries that were now being treated at the Titans Tower med-bay by the most talent doctors in the city. The light that everyone on the western seaboard all the way out to the Midwest had seen ignite the sky was reported as the detonation of the high-tech gadget that gave the villain all his strength. The fate of the villain was never mentioned to the public, and when local authorities questioned Robin about it, he told them that the man had evaded capture, but wouldn't be troubling the city again for a long time—which was just about as far as Robin was willing to lie for the public's peace of mind. He didn't know what the heck had happened to Blue, or even that that was the alias the brute went by. The only person that might be able to enlighten Robin was still unconscious, along with half his team.

When the ambulances arrived, Robin had quickly directed them to Starfire and Raven, both of whom were covered in Starfire's blood where they lay in an embrace of mortality, Raven having fallen onto Stafire when she lost consciousness. The medics had treated the two as well as they could on the spot and got them careening toward the Tower med-bay without hesitation.

Concerned about the trustworthiness of the pale stranger, but owing too much to let himself deny aid, and having more questions than he thought his head could contain, he directed the medics to pick up the unconscious young man that had rescued them all and sent him to the tower as well, hoping to whatever higher power might be listening that this wasn't another Terra. The obviously super-talented young man would have some questions to answer, and a lot of trust to earn, but considering how close they all came to being eradicated today, Robin felt the guy was owed the benefit of the doubt.

Those three taken care of, Robin lead a search party of medics through the rubble, searching for the other two Titans and anyone else that might need help. A quick look around the area that Robin remembered seeing Beast Boy fly after being hit last turned up the skinny green elf without trouble. He was badly concussed, feeling far too disoriented to stand, much less to transform or even remember that a battle was going on at all. Leaving some medics with him, Robin took the rest to find their final errant ally.

After about ten minutes (it was a lot farther than Robin remembered now that he didn't have a homicidal super killer to contend with) they made their way back to where Cyborg had fallen, only to find an empty crater in a pile of stone and a path that something was dragged along. Following the path they found leaking mechanical fluids, bits of wire, and several other odds and ends that hinted at what had made the path, before finally tracking it to the source. Cyborg, it seemed from the evidence and his later confirmation, had taken some bad damage to his leg actuators and power core, effectively immobilizing him from the waist down after the last punch the brute laid on him. However, never one to sit around when needed, he had dragged himself along the ground, hand over hand, clawing his way toward the sound of battle. Eventually, the damage to his power core proved too much, and he was forced to deactivate himself or self-destruct, an end that wouldn't have helped anyone. Calling in a salvage helicopter, they airlifted him to Titans Tower.

Arriving in the Helicopter hours behind everyone else (except Cy of course), Robin's fatigue knew no bounds, nor any foreseeable respite. The only things that had allowed him to function through the long afternoon of searching were the bubble of fear for his friends' health that his consciousness floated upon, the enormous burden of responsibility that being team leader had always left him with, and a series of localized anesthetics he'd been steadily injecting into his ribs to keep the pain from laying him low. He knew, beyond doubt, that he would regret the damage he was doing to himself by continuing to move around with his ribs broken, but he never even considered doing anything else. As Starfire had taught him, the welfare of his friends had to come first—that was the only way to repay their deep trust in him, and he refused to let them down.

Once he was off the helicopter, he guided the men pushing Cyborg's trolley down to the repair bay in the metal man's room. Personally hooking the emergency power cord into a port on his big friend's back, Robin stood by as the lights came back on under the various circuits and armor plates, waiting for the red light of his artificial eye to blink on. With a jerk and some yelling, he came back online, reactivating at the exact moment he had turned off, with him desperately trying to get back into the battle and help his injured friends. After two seconds of frantic flailing that threatened to pitch him off the repair bed, he noticed his new surroundings.

Once he recovered from the shock of the translocation, he noticed Robin and the salvage helicopter crew, and realized what must have happened. Several questions later, he learned the rest of the story from around the time he shut off, and experienced a number of reactions to the delayed information. There was shame at not helping out on the rest of the fight, shock and fear at the news of Starfire's and Beast Boy's fates, wonder at word of Raven's valiant act and the surprise rescue from a mystery man, and bitter hate for the villain who had managed by some mysterious means to escape after doing all that damage. Sighing after the quick recap, he asked Robin to go so he could begin repairing himself. He rejected the offer of the helicopter crew to help, urging them to instead get home to their families, insisting that he preferred to be the only one doing body work on his body. With a promise to visit later, Robin left to move on to the other issues that were weighing on his mind.

Taking the elevator down to the med-bay, Robin walked in to a scene of what had doubtlessly been furious action not long ago. Despite the fact that he had seen it many times before, this time the med-bay struck him as a much less inviting place than it ever had in the past, almost certainly because it contained the potential of holding so much horrible information. Walking up to a group of tired-looking medical personnel, he asked after the fate of each of his friends in turn.

First he asked about Beast Boy, and was told that the green shape shifter, while still shaken up and having trouble with balance and double vision, was basically fine and would make a full recovery in a few days. They had been concerned after a period of nausea, but knew that he couldn't be too badly hurt when a young nurse had asked him "How many fingers am I holding up?" and he had answered "As many as you want to pretty lady," with a woozy version of his flirting voice.

Smiling in spite of himself, he next asked after Raven. She was probably the least badly hurt of all the Titans, physically speaking anyway. Her only real problem was a seriously low blood sugar level that they had a direct I.V. drip working on constantly, and would be over with in no time. The problem arose when one examined her brainwave scans, which showed irregularity often associated with severe trauma, making it rather uncertain when she would awaken. She had been improving toward normal (for Raven) brainwaves steadily though, so it was hoped that she would make a full recovery.

Next he asked about the stranger. Apparently he had begun talking in the ambulance, ensuring the medics that he was fine and that all he needed was rest. Finding nothing wrong with him besides severe exhaustion in the cursory examination that he had allowed them to give him, (as he gave quite a tongue lashing to the two when they tried to do and eye check and a few other things) they had done nothing but carted him to an empty bed in the med-bay. He was resting now, having left word to not be disturbed. Curiously, he had never moved a single inch while berating medics and dictating orders.

Finally, Robin felt he could bring up what was really worrying him without feeling like he was showing overt favoritism. He felt that it would be an irresponsible betrayal to rush directly to the side of the one person his heart truly pounded with fear for, the girl he would have sacrificed his life for six times over, even before any of his other friends. Shocked, he told himself off internally for even thinking such a treacherous thought with his friends all injured, even though he knew it was true. In any case, as bad, bad luck would have it, the one girl he was most concerned about was the one girl who was in true mortal danger.

When she had arrived, the doctors had done their best to stitch up the multiple cuts, including the bad stomach wound, treating everything with disinfectant and generally doing as much as they could on that front. There was the significant problem, however, that there were no doctors anywhere on the planet qualified to perform surgery on a Tamaranean girl, and surgery was definitely needed. The blunt force trauma from Blue's full force punch had caused mild but un-discountable internal bleeding that, if it didn't stop, would eventually bleed her dry, meanwhile playing havoc with her internal organs. Really all they could do was set up a steady supply of transfusion blood and hope for the bleeding to stop on it's own. Looking back now, Robin decided it was fortunate in the extreme that he had forced Starfire, despite her rather cute fear of needles, to store several spare blood bags worth of her own for an emergency like this. They all hoped that kind of thing would never be necessary, but the precaution now was the only thing keeping her with him, and so he thanked his lucky stars for the perseverance he'd shown on that issue.

"You really should calm down boy wonder," had said a nerdy looking orderly that had helped move extra medical equipment in with the doctors. "I mean," he'd continued, "those Tamaraneans are built a lot tougher than you and me—they got constitution, y'know? I mean, if it had been you, not even your armor would have kept you from having internal organs that look like my mother's goulash, y'know?"

After fighting off the urge to punch out the orderly for butting in, reminding him of his failure to protect her, and informing him that it wasn't him that was injured instead of her (as he'd whished a million times by now), he coolly thanked him for the reassurance. In the end, the orderly was right, Robin had tried to convince himself, because how many times had he seen her pick up a car, take a punch from a Slade-bot or from Mammoth, or incinerate something huge? She was a tough girl, and a few internal wounds weren't going to stop her, not as if that kept his legs from feeling like water when he walked into her room.

As he gazed at her still form where she lay on the hospital bed, his heart skipped a beat. She was so motionless that if it hadn't been for the beeping of the pulse monitor, he would have been sure that she had passed away while the doctors weren't looking. As he pulled up a chair, leaned forward against her bed, and took her hand in his, he let his true fear wash over him. Starfire had received an awful blow to the head when that fist sent her flying, and even now lay comatose, unresponsive to everything but thankfully still breathing. As his head rested against the side of her bed, he felt a pain deep in his heart, a pain that spread like a cancer through his soul at the thought of never again seeing Star's smile, never hearing her laugh, never watching her chug another bottle of mustard, never hearing her butcher another English idiom. But most of all he hurt at the thought of never telling her something he should have said ages back, "Starfire..." he whispered to her still form, "I love you."

This was his final act before a different kind of pain emerged, a familiar ache in his lower chest that he'd been chasing away all day. Wishing to spend more time with Starfire before he reported his own injury to the doctor, he pulled his last anesthetic mini-hypodermic needle from his utility belt. Before he could even get a decent grip on it however, the pain in his side began to balloon steadily to a burning agony. He dropped the needle and clutched his side, nearly fainting instantly form the stupendous pain. Staving off oblivion for a moment, he tried to cry out only to gag without warning, something choking him from within. Coughing and sputtering, he was horrified to see red flecks appear on Starfire's pure white hospital sheets.

Panic clawing at his heart, he tried to get up, to shout out for help, to make it out to the aid that waited beyond the nearby door, but simply couldn't motivate his body to this one last great effort. Robin had overdrawn himself, he'd spent ever bit of energy he had, and now there was nothing to sustain him. This day had left him with no strength, no confidence, and now that his Star was falling, he had no happiness either, nothing to inspire his ragged body to save itself. The only thing he had now was the white-hot searing in his chest, which had already begun to blank out his mind.

As the pain left, as everything left, he was suddenly alone, just him and one long, slow, lonely fall into the cold darkness that waited. Slumping forward onto Starfire's bed, he was able to see her angelic face from where it peeked out of the white covers. He could almost imagine her eyes opening, turning to gaze at him, her leaning down to kiss him, even as blood began to leak from his lips and trace a crimson path over the pristine white. There was something at the edge of his vision too, a kind of flickering at the corner of his eyes. He could tell it was a man, and it was one he should recognize, and he realized that he was annoyed because the figure was distracting him from how soft Star's lips were. He was angry then at himself, because he was getting such a stupid interrupted hallucination as his life ended. But then that was all.

Oscillogenerator Secret Construction Site

White was furious. Then again, furious was too soft a word to describe that which he was feeling just this moment. Perhaps if one imagined the burning, raging, all consuming super-novas of a thousand red giant stars, then one might have some small inkling of the extent of his rage. But of course he must not let the others see this, nooo. It was important that he remained outwardly calm and make it clear how very little this SPECTACULAR, MISREBLE, DISGUSTING _FAILURE_ bothered him. White glared at the communicator built into his office's desk, eyeing it with suspicion as if the others could read his thoughts through the connection that it held to them. "_Of course,_" he thought, calming somewhat, "_You're the only one around here that can read thoughts._"

Brooding over the matter that occupied his mind once again, he considered the mess Blue had made. Blue had been sent on a milk run. A cake walk. A pleasure cruise. A frolic through the garden. Any other comparable expression of a task so easy as to be impossible to mess up. But what had the stupid FUCK managed to accomplish? Nothing! Nothing but another embarrassment to himself and the syndicate, as well as a miserable little delay in the construction of the oscillogenerator.

Even now, the cavernous space outside his office was rumbling with activity as the foundations of his masterpiece work of evil genius got underway. The other members were doing their assigned tasks spectacularly, and already White had most of the raw materials and the beginning of a labor force to do the grunt work involved. This performance on their part was also a thorn in his side because it gave him no good reason to send one of them off to eliminate the nearly dead protectors of the city. "_Bah,_" he scolded himself, "_Any further attempts on their lives will be considered unusual, and real heroes will come to investigate before I'm ready for them._"

With that thought, he gave up on rubbing out the "Teen Titans" for the time being, deciding instead to concentrate on getting the oscillogenerator up as quickly as possible. "_I can eliminate those brats any time I choose, and it's not as if they have any real chance of finding us here and bringing in the truly dangerous Justice League._"

Satisfied, White turned his attention toward the progress of his worker drones outside. Having complete control over their minds through a simple surgical process (a kind of lobotomy), he used a small portion of his brain's immense power to direct them about their tasks, turning the useless human apes into productive slave labor. Even as he contemplated his peons, another shipment of them arrived, ready to be processed. Red's abduction operation was going very well, and White already had dozens at his command, with eight to twelve more coming in with each passing day.

On the other side of the construction area, he could sense construction materials coming in by the truckload, bought up from the very human markets that would be first to taste the oscillogenerator's power. Green managed that end, her spectacular abilities showing their worth in the constant stream of capital she made oh so easily available with the human business she had started.

Finally, in another area, white could feel the stockpiles of special chemicals and highly advanced electronics that Yellow had been set to gathering for the generator's more intricate parts. Currently out on another black market run to whatever planets he went to for this trade, Yellow was also far ahead of his quotas. Wallowing in the success on this front of his plans then, White was aghast when a sudden explosion rocked the base.

Throwing out his telepathic senses, White quickly spotted the source of the disturbance. Blue was awake, and apparently the brute had gotten up on the wrong side of the regeneration tank he'd been floating in, because he was jumping around, destroying everything he could get his hands on. Furious, White reached out and exerted a massive amount of telepathic force on Blue's enraged mind, ignoring the incredible hazards that such attacks always mean. Within just a moment, the wall of rage in Blue's mind faltered before the obscene amount of power pressing on it, but not before force rebounding off the rage shield could fly off in random directions and explode the heads of four nearby mind-slaves. (The average mind simply couldn't take being touched by so much power, and the energy flowing between their ears creates an explosive force with very messy results.) Dozens of other slaves keeled over, puking their guts out at the massive disorientation that White's psychic assault was spreading through the construction area.

White didn't care about his expendable pawns however, and the task he had set his mind to was quickly achieved: Blue had crumbled under the unrestrained telepathic attack, and even now lay immobile on the ground. It hadn't been soon enough though, and the construction had been set back weeks in the few moment of unopposed raging Blue had gotten in, no doubt in reference to his unexpected defeat. White's invisible telepathic presence glared angrily at the stupid fool, even now contemplating the proper punishment.

His disguise had been removed, being too badly damaged to continue use, and now the alien was revealed in his true form. Vaguely humanoid, he was graced with two arms, two legs, and one head. However, that's about where the similarities ended. He was a dull red color all over, with random interspersions of rock-like purple blemishes speckling his skin at random. He wore no cloths—none of the parts he would care to cover showed through the thicker covering of blemishes from his waist down. Much like the human disguise White had painstakingly created for him, his shoulders, arms, and back were far larger than his legs would suggest, and every inch of his upper body was sculpted with muscles harder than most known metals. His alias came from the color of his eye, sitting in its huge cyclopean glory smack in the middle of his purple-speckled skull.

Not that that brain dead Klibnarian would ever understand, White mused to himself, but it wasn't these muscles that gave him power so much as the spectacular inner energy he harnessed. Humans would call it 'chi' or some such, and Blue had more of it than he would ever need, more than probably any one being in the known universe had ever contained. To make matters worse, Blue was possessed of a potential for indiscriminate homicidal rage that matched his inner energy dreadfully well, even magnifying it, giving him a talent for blind destructive force that was unmatched. Which made it all the more mysterious to White how he had managed to loose to some single serving-sized superheroes. He was too stupid and clumsy to be of use to White now that the syndicate was out of prison and now he wasn't even able to do what he supposedly did best—White was really incredibly unhappy about it all.

Having come to terms with the fact of the failure a moment ago, White decided it was time to discover its circumstances. Peering indiscreetly into the unconscious behemoth's mind he sifted through the recent memories until he had what he needed. And it worried him.

A cold nervousness broke out in the mastermind's stomach, the first he'd felt since this whole scheme had set off those months ago in lock up. He reviewed the battle in his head again, just to be sure, but the repetition didn't change the outcome, and the unmistakable memory of undergoing 'the draining' was once again the finale to the bloody brawl. His nervousness was based on uncertainty, that and a very bad memory of his own. Because, the IDP agent that had captured him was the only being he knew of capable of that particularly fell attack, and he didn't appreciate the fact that he couldn't tell from Blue's memories who exactly had used it on him. There was the possibility that one of the Titans, or maybe some other unexpected hero that had been present in the city, could use it, but that didn't eliminate the chance that HE was here now, looking for White. In fact, since the probe had not yet returned with information on the assassination attempt, there was nothing at all to discount that very dangerous happening, and it was the first thought he'd had in ages that truly scared him.

Snapping out of his reverie, he assigned some of his drones to put Blue in crystal stasis while he thought over this new information. White was certain beyond doubt that his cover job on the assassin's ship and mind were flawless, but he hadn't gotten as far as he was now by being careless of such very real threats. Considering the fact that the IDP fleet wasn't already knocking down his door, he knew that even if it was THAT agent, he wasn't totally aware of his presence. Thinking this, he damned himself for using the teleporter to recover Blue (it being a dead giveaway to a higher technology presence), then changed his mind and praised his own foresight in steeling away Blue before he could be read for all the sensitive information he'd been exposed to. Finally, he decided on taking some extra precautions, and as much as he hated to, he gave the orders for a new priority item to be placed at the top of the list of things for Yellow to buy on the black market: zappers.

White so far had avoided ordering their procurement, happy to have the other's minds open for his own viewing pleasure, knowing that this would keep them honest. However, the others were complaining and growing restless about this hole in their security, using fear of enemy mental attacks as an excuse to have walls to think freely behind, no doubt aching to hatch a plot to usurp him. "_Fat chance of that happening_," he thought with malice.

Suddenly, a devilishly sneaky thought crept into White's evil mind. He could safely satisfy those backstabbers' desire to plot against him with their zappers AND protect his operation from a telepathic infiltration at the same time. All it would take was some simple tampering with the zapper shipment...

Titans Tower med-bay, Skye's room

Since the incident, Vera had had very little contact with Skye, his consciousness mysteriously absent for all but a relatively minor portion of their trip back from the battlefield. After getting over her anger at his inability to pay attention to her and her important insights into their opponent's disappearance and the image in the energy blast that Skye had vented, she had finally become concerned for his health. Well... mildly concerned. It didn't really make sense to become too concerned about weather or not an IDP agent would recover from pretty much any injury. The IDP, having invested so many resources in training and equipping its agents, invested just as much in giving them staying power. Having gone through numerous treatments involving nanomachine colony implantation and biological optimization, Skye could, and had before, regenerated from injuries far worse than the ones he had sustained from the bodily stress overload earlier. As well, he was immune to disease, infection, poison, and low levels of radiation.

Knowing this AND having complete access to his implant's nanoregenerator (the tiny machines that reconstruct his cells when he's injured) and life signs monitor, Vera could be more than a little sure that he would be okay. But for Skye, whether his body recovered and whether his mind recovered were quite possibly two different things, and the lack of responsiveness to her constant questioning of his presence was managing to get her a little worried. In fact, she hadn't heard a peep from him since a few minutes after he fell down, when he had told her to hold down the fort for him while he took some time to repair his mind from the astral plane.

Since then, she'd done a number of things she hadn't thought possible before, another situation that was contributing to her current stress. On the list of things Skye had given her to watch over were several items that she was aware this planet's level of medical practice involved, so when Skye's eyes (which he kept open for her before projecting out) saw what were pretty clearly medical personnel coming to aid him, she was forced to act fast. Searching the implant's features more closely than she had in the past, she tracked down a file that she had only glazed over earlier, and which Skye had told her would be very useful in watching over his prone body.

Marked "Emergency motor controls: only enabled during lack of host consciousness," the file contained protocols that allowed someone manipulating the implant's programming to control Skye's body while he wasn't able to. Having never seen anything like it, Vera could only wonder at where Skye had gotten it and what exactly kind of situations he and Alice had been in that had prompted him to get a hold of it in the first place. Acting at the speed only an electronic brain like hers could manage, she integrated the program's tutorial into her neural net, getting a general sense of how it worked, then had control, of a sort, by the time the medics had gotten her and Skye into the ambulance.

"Hey, guys, how ya doin?" she said congenially, using the mechanism that forced his mouth to move, testing out the system. Pleasantly surprised when the voice that spoke the words was about three octave's deeper than the one she chose to synthesize as her own, she smiled to herself (A.I.s, having no faces, treat smiles as more of a state of mind) and quickly worked out her story, even as the two medics in the back of the ambulance started in surprise.

"I appreciate the ride, but really, I'm fine. I'm just a little tired after helping the others take on that big monster. So, if you two would just be so kind as to let me rest, I'll be up and ready for the victory celebration in no time."

"Uh, okay kid," spoke a twenty something medical technician, even as he pulled out some basic first aid equipment and got ready to do a quick check for injuries, as if he hadn't heard at all. "I'll just be giving you a once over to be sure nothing's wrong, make certain all the bits and pieces are still working right."

"Fine, whatever, just don't touch the shades, mess with my cloths, or bring a needle anywhere near me, and we'll be good."

"I'm sorry kid," stated a now irate med-tech, still not turning from his efforts on getting all the necessary parts out of small compartments in the back of moving vehicle, "but I have to check your eyes for responsiveness and get your shirt off to check your breathing, so you'll just have to bear with me."

Not about to stand for this for a second, Vera launched Skye's voice into a tirade of epic proportions, chewing out the medic mercilessly about everything from his lineage to his scruffiness, all along making damn sure they didn't do anything Skye wouldn't have approved of. Quickly getting fed up, the man had told her off right back, finishing a string of rude comments with the observation that Skye nagged like an old lady.

"Just give it up Jim, let's just do what we can and leave the guy alone if he's gonna be a baby about it, okay?" the second medic had cut in at last. He had remained quiet so far, but couldn't take the noise anymore. This was not lost on the younger medic, and knowing an unspoken threat of a pay cut was on the table if the bickering didn't stop, he agreed to do some tests that wouldn't involve any of the things Vera had prohibited.

The rest of the trip passed in complete silence other than the sound of the ambulance's siren, none of them feeling like making small talk after the bad scene of moments ago. It seemed like ages passed before they arrived at the bay the Tower stood in, the specially secured automobile tunnel opening to allow them through after the lead ambulance used the medical override on the security system. After a short jaunt under the bay, they were in the tower garage, ambulances unloading injured superheroes right next to Robin's Birdcycle and the T-Car. The two medics carted the gurney with Skye's body to a private room in the med-bay, then left without a word, leaving Vera alone with Skye's vacant body at last. Relieved to be past that crisis, Vera relaxed and deactivated most of her systems, preparing for what could be a long wait. All she had to do now was hope, and maybe pray, that Skye's spirit returned from the astral plane safe and recovered. She really needn't have ever worried.

Sky outside of Titans Tower

Skye's spirit form was quite an impressive sight—to anyone that could see it anyway. Spiritual energy exists on a wavelength that most people and instruments simply can't perceive, and that the vast majority of whom never even considered. Because, and this is important, this energy vibrates on a dimensional axis, oscillating with respect to the fabric of existence rather than any mundane medium that things like eyes and cameras can detect. Therein, if you wanted to have a chance at being impressed by the magnificent appearance of the pale telepath's spirit form, one would have to do one of two things. Either get a hold of spectacularly advanced trans-dimensional sensor equipment, or be born with some kind of mystical energy in one's blood that, with training, would give one aura vision.

Achieving either of these massive feats of determination would be worth it, to glimpse the swirl of white light and sparkling brilliance that was Skye's consciousness incarnate. The way its ever-shifting amorphous form flowed and eddied was mesmerizing, speaking of unimaginable power and superlative control all at once. As it danced through the air, for a while it appeared to be an eagle in full flight, then a horse galloping over the clouds, then a man's muscular silhouette sprinting between the stars. In truth though, all these things were illusions, tricks of the mind's eye trying to attribute form to the formless, desperately attempting to box a wonderful impossibility into something understandable, lest the observer loose his or her sanity to the brilliance.

Unlike lesser telepaths, who used the form of an aspect focus (a bird, a plant, some mythical beast, anyhting that they associated with strongly enough to concentrate on) to maintain their sense of individuality and being against the rigors of out of body travel, Skye operated on a different level. Having achieved the pinnacle of telepathic development, Skye traversed the astral realm and cruised the ether of space unbound by any recognizable aspect, instead moving as only the truly skilled could—in the form of pure thought, colored only by the sparkling pristine silver-white of his soul's true form.

He was returning from a trip to the astral plane, a dimension parallel to all others in which a person with Skye's talents could do many things impossible in the real world. On this particular trip, Skye had traveled to the spirit focus he had planted in his own personal corner of that dimension long ago. Because the mechanism would take forever to describe, and is really quite boring anyway, let it suffice to say that through great concentration upon his astral spirit focus, Skye was able to draw together all the scattered pieces of his tattered psyche, reconstruct them like a psychedelic four-dimensional puzzle, and fuse them back together as good as new. It had been a rather desperate gambit to project out of his body with his mind all shredded to pieces like that, but it had been his only chance, and it had paid off, so he allowed the truth of how spectacularly close to dying he had come to slip from his thoughts as he basked in the glory of his spirit flying freely over the green waters. Turning his mind's eye to the city, he watched the latent psychic energy produced by the busy people there radiate into space, warming the cosmos with waves of telepathic power produced by the collective unconscious of a living settlement full of intelligent beings. Admiring the beauty of the multicolored clouds of iridescent smoky emissions, a view rare in the reaches of space that his work kept him in, he knew that deep down, there were more important things to be done.

Wrenching his senses from the beauty of the night, he turned his attention to the imposing T-shaped tower that his body had been moved to while his mind recovered itself. Following the imperceptibly tiny thread of telepathic energy that all spirit travelers use to keep an anchor to their bodies, he tracked his corporeal shell to a discreet medical room within the Tower. Flying through walls like they weren't there, (because to his spirit, they really weren't there) he reached the small, private room and cast his perceptions down at his body.

He was about to make contact with his body and reunite with Vera and every other part of mundane existence when severe psychic disturbances began to emanate from nearby—disturbances that piqued his concern and sent him questing for their source. The invisibly flashing silver specter that was Skye traversed several rooms in turn, noting their contents as he passed on his way to the source.

In the room next to his, a badly injured spirit lay sedated in bed, slowly recovering from a blow that had clearly almost winked out the glowing green flame of his soul. A quick examination of his aura revealed the spirit of an animal and a man combined, forming a whole much more powerful than either part. The young man's aura projected a feel of jungles, oceans, savannas, tundra, mountains, and every kind of forest under the sun, all at the same time in a brilliant spectrum of psychic sensations that fascinated Skye. Curiously, Skye noted, as he wished the young man a silent 'good luck' for recovering, there was also a pervading sense of...soy beans? In any case, this all took place in the instant it took Skye to pass that room and on to the next.

As he turned his perceptions to the contents of this room, Skye received quite a spectacular little surprise. Lying in this bed was a female aura that, to Skye's experienced senses, was one belonging to a being with no small mental abilities (psychic powers and brains both). A casual examination of this aura as he passed revealed little to nothing other than that her soul's energy was spectacularly jet black with white highlights ("_Which says something significant about the nature of her lineage_," Skye's momentary suspicion flashed), and little wonder he gleaned so little considering the magnificent mental shield the woman maintained. Unlike the shield of rage that the brute had used as a side effect of his berserk fury and the artificial zapper shield the subspace assassin had used, skilled minds like his and this woman's erected barriers of thought energy around their psychic cores. These shields served to keep out attackers, keep in excessive power that could potentially harm nearby people, and for Skye at least, to filter out the annoying background buzz of thought that people projected into the air without realizing it. Taking a guess based on the currents of the telepathic ether around her bed, Skye supposed she was regenerating her mind and powers in much the way he had done on the astral plane (where he found it much easier to do than on the physical plane). Intrigued almost more than he could ever remember having been before, Skye nonetheless passed by and on to the source of the disturbance.

Focusing his senses at last on the room he felt the mental anguish coming from, Skye was granted a scene of grisly and heart-rending horror. Taking in the situation by absorbing the cacophony of stressed thoughts lingering in the room and combining them with his limited memory of the battle, Skye pieced together the soul-crushing tale of broken hearts and cruel fate in instants, leaving even his experience-jaded mind momentarily stunned from the dire cruelty blind chance had dealt the young man and woman beneath him. When he could think again after his mind had finally encompassed the disgusting irony playing out before him, he took in the rest of the situation quickly.

Below his sparkling spirit lay an aura of royal blue so deep and majestic that Skye knew instantly that it's owner was a hero of no small mettle. The color in question would only come to a person who lived their lives by a code of honor, protected the week, aided the needy, fought against injustice, and placed the lives of his friends and loved ones before his own. Even as he thought this however, he noted that this mind was the source of the dissonance in the room, filling the air with despair as the majestic blue of his life force gradually faded away. The departing life was pitching such a fit of bleak discontent in fact, that it received a pulse of resonating sympathy from the room's other occupant.

This second spirit was a female one, non-human (though that didn't make a whole lot of difference in aura) and noteworthy both for its spectacular beauty and the enormous extent to which it had been dimmed by life-and-death struggle. The phantasmal green-and-orange ghost of an aura surrounding her was still beautiful beyond description, despite it's wavering and flickering. The resplendence of one's aura denotes a combination of one's telepathic ability and inner character, and lacking any telepathic ability, Skye assumed the girl must posses a spiritual purity usually reserved for saints and higher-dimensional beings (angels). As the dying blue aura railed against the spectacular injustice of the situation, a resonate pulse leapt from the faded green/orange one, and before Skye's amazed senses, a specter of spiritual energy was released from the woman with a flash.

Rising up, the spectral form acquired the shape of the nearly dead woman, duplicating her form perfectly in a riot of orange and green blurs, with her face and resplendent ruby-ochre hair done in absolute photo-realism. Immediately, the form twisted around, faced the dying man, leaned down, and pressed her ghostly lips against his bloody ones. Skye meanwhile was amazed beyond thought. He had heard of such occurrences of course, but never before had he witnessed such a spectacular, beautiful, heartbreaking, soul-wrenching, mind-numbing sight as a union of sympathetic spirits. Knowing that this moment of absolute spiritual magnificence would live on in his mind forever imprinted upon his perfect memory, Skye suddenly felt an unbreakable and all-enduring bond with these other young people, and with that came a new and entirely natural sensation. Like molten steel flowing into the core of his mind, unstoppable determination focused him upon a single thought: "_I will not let them die._"

Snapping back into his body in the infinitesimal speck of time that exists between one thought and the next, he looked through his already opened natural eyes to see the blackness that comes from a darkened room and sunglasses combination. Brushing off Vera's sound of surprise at his sudden return and her subsequent attempts to question him with an override command that she couldn't deny, Skye immediately sat up in bed. Thereafter, he immediately wished he hadn't. Though his body had been regenerating constantly since his fall after the battle, he was far from healthy again, and his abused systems protested every attempted movement.

When Skye tried to stand, he fell immediately to his knees, a piercing pain stabbing into his lower back and taking his feet right from under him. Apparently the medics, who hadn't checked him over before placing him on the gurney, had lain him down with his laser blaster still under the back of his shirt. Pressing into his back for hours on end, it had created a spectacular bruise that made even the thought of walking unbearably painful. The pain playing with his mind, he sacrificed dignity for haste and crawled over to the door. It opened automatically when he got near, and after throwing himself through and collapsing onto the floor, he was gratified to gain the attention of several medical personnel that had been on standby outside.

"Dying...over there..." he managed to squeeze out through the haze of pain he floated on, as six people rushed over and began to check on him. They didn't seem to hear, becoming absorbed in the task of 'saving' his life. As he tried futilely to grasp their attention with his suddenly feeble voice, a bar of pure fury at their lack of understanding blasted through the haze of pain and gave him the clarity he needed for an act of desperation. Pulsing a powerful and poorly designed compulsion into all of their minds simultaneously, he caused each and every one of them to turn on their heels and rush to Starfire's med-bay door, nearly tripping over each other in their collective attempt to open it (it was courtesy locked from within, so didn't auto-slide like his). After some fumbling, one hand prevailed, and a collective gasp went up as the doctors saw what had happened within. Unlike Skye, who even as unconsciousness threatened could see vague outlines of the embracing auras through the intervening wall, the doctors gasped at the sight of fresh blood flecked across the sheets, streaming along the side of the bed, and pooling on the floor beneath a clearly dying Robin.

"PREP THE O.R.!" shouted the first doctor to regain his senses, and the med-bay degenerated into a fury of action as a gurney was wheeled in and Robin was carted off to get another chance at life. The second he was moved, the lingering image of loveliness evaporated, and with it went Skye's only reason to struggle against unconsciousness.

"_You idiot_," he thought to himself as he let the world fade away from where he lay on his chest on the floor, "_Why the hell didn't you just use a compulsion from the bed?_"

And with the knowledge that he had done all he conceivably could have to try and save these strangers that he had known for only a handful of hours, he dipped into the blackness that was deeper than sleep.

Preview: Ug... I know it was dirty to string you all along like that, but honestly, I didn't even know who would survive this chapter until I had nearly finished writing it. In the end, it would be a greater service to my long-term plot for everyone to be available for moving the story along. Plus...I'm just not the death-fic kind of guy. At least not for the MAIN characters ha HA HAHAHAHA! (Loud Maniacal Laughter). Next chapter Skye and Vera get a chance to recap after all that craziness, a pair of psychics have a pair of prophetic experiences, said psychics meet (quite a scene that), and we see why this story is called _The Albino Telepath Saga_ (if you hadn't guessed yet). What could this be? Is a romance Blooming in an unexpected place? Find out in: Consideration, Confrontation, and Convalesing.


	7. Consideration, Confrontation, and Conval...

Intro: Another one up, and it's another big one. Stick around through this one last big OC-centric portion and we can really begin to dig into the Titans, starting with Raven. Opposites attract is sort of cliché I know, but I felt I had a pretty good take on this one, and, not to give too much away, there's a very good chance the attraction could be a fatal one, if you catch my drift. I'm saying nothing more, you've got the whole rest of the story to get this one down.

Update note: somewhere between when I first posted this and when I came to post a new version, stopped accepting C-brackets in its documents. Go figure. In any case, I've started using italicization for all forms of mental speech now.

Chapter 7: Consideration, Confrontation, and Convalescing

Who Knows Where?

Skye stands alone on an endless, gray, flat plane. The featureless landscape proceeds to the horizon, where it meets with the roiling black clouds that shroud the sky. He is alone on the empty vastness but for a single figure that stands shrouded in shadows before him. As he tries to make out the details of the figure, it advances toward him and steps from the sourceless shadows that crowed around it.

The figure that stands before him is a person about a foot shorter than he is wearing a deep blue cloak. The cloak's hood and cape totally shroud the figure's features, but Skye can tell that the person behind the cloak is an old familiar friend.

"Why did you lie to us? Why did you lie to me?" a soft, oh so icy-neutral female voice asks. For some reason, the voice seems to come from everywhere at once, though Skye knows it was the figure that spoke.

"I didn't lie, I just didn't tell you everything." Skye heard his own voice respond, though he had not meant to say anything.

"And you think that makes it any better? They're all gone because of your little omission," was the menacingly indifferent response. Skye knew somehow that the neutrality was the slightest of curtains drawn across a hate and murderous intent that knew no bounds.

"I'm sorry. I never meant for any of that to happen. But we're still here, we can still be together!" Skye's voice shouted, a note of desperation edging through the repentance in his tone.

"It's too late for that now. It's too late for everything. There is only one thing left for me to do," said the voice from everywhere as the figure backed away slowly. When it had taken a few steps back, Skye began to follow, still nothing but an observer to this strange scene as his body moved of its own accord.

Suddenly, the cloaked figure began to grow, black shadow flowing from under the cloak and building it upward to a ten-foot stature. The cloak flew open, revealing nothing but deep black tentacles covered in needles of glinting obsidian. Four glowing red eyes lit up under the hood that still obscured the monster's face, and then the towering beast of shadow was ready to strike.

"I WILL HAVE MY REVENGE, AND THEN HATERED SHALL RULE!" shrieked a monstrous and rage-filled mockery of the female voice from before. Without hesitation then, spiked tentacles lashed out at Skye as he advanced on the figure. As the first was about to strike a ribbon of light that shot from Skye's hand deflected it, and he knew he must have been wearing his gauntlets. Ignoring the attacking tentacles, which were continually deflected by streamers of light from his gauntlets, Skye's body strode toward the tower of shadow and held out his fist, which was already glowing with white light.

"So mote it be," his voice said, completely null of emotion but edged with a sorrow that knew no bounds, and millions of spines of deadly white energy lanced from his fist and pierced the shadow figure innumerable times. As the figure screeched and spasmed around the impaling light, the tentacles reached down and wrapped him up, even as several where struck and destroyed by spears of light from Skye's free hand. As they touched his skin, they sunk in their needles, piercing him through just as many times as he had the beast.

The mutually impaled pair spun around in a dance of death. Blood sprayed freely, the hiss of its warm, steaming gouts underscoring the crackling of mutual annihilation as the white and black energies consumed one another. Skye felt no pain, but as the gray conglomeration of black and white essence raced toward simultaneous destruction, a fear like no other reached up and settled on his heart.

With intensity beyond description, the fear infiltrated every corner of his psyche, blanking out all other thought with directionless, nauseating panic. Even as he and the beast twirled toward oblivion, he felt his heart beat harder and harder, until its blistering pace of machine gun beats filled his chest with numbness that quickly spread though his body.

Skye and the Beast were both enveloped by gray as hard and unfeeling as the endless landscape around them, spreading outward from Skye's heart, as well as the beast's own, until it had encased them both completely. Skye's heart then managed to beat even faster, until it felt as though it would explode with the force of it's own vibration. And then it did.

Titan's Tower Med-Bay

"AAAHHH!" Skye's eyes flew open as his body spasmed with uncontrollable fear. When his eyes were stabbed by blinding light, he snapped them shut again, settling down to a slow shuddering as he broke out in a cold sweat. He wasn't sure where he was, or what he'd been doing to make his whole body ache the way it did, but he knew that he had just had one hell of a dream, and that dreams like that meant something.

"_Well look who finally decided to wake up_," said an annoyed female voice inside his head. "It would seem that the dead really do rise now and then."

"_Vera? What happened? Where am I?_" asked Skye, more than a little disoriented from the bad dream and the flash in the eyes.

"_In that order: yes it's me, you tried to move while your whole body was injured from that fight with the huge guy, and this is a medical facility on your homeworld. Any of that ring any bells_?"

It did, of course, and as the various things that had been clouding his mind dissipated, Skye felt the memories of the past hours flood back with crystal clarity. Lying back calmly then, he allowed himself to relax in the comfortable, if now a little clammy, hospital bed, his eyes closed against the room's bright lights.

"_Now we're back on the same page_," Skye affirmed before continuing. "_All I need to know now is where the heck my cloths and sunglasses are, Vera?_" he queried calmly.

"_OOOOHHHH…_" she vented a sigh that promised a storm of criticism, "_After everything you just put me through you think you can come on all cool and unconcerned! YOU ALMOST DIED! I COULD HAVE DIED! DO YOU KNOW HOW WORRIED I WAS?_"

"_Okay, Okay_," Skye apologized, knowing he would have some listening to do before he could take the actions his mind was already planning out, "_so now that I have a few moments where there isn't any imminent danger, brief me on what's been going on since we last had a second._"

"_Hmf! After the way you shut me down the other night, I hardly think I owe you any of the stuff I've learned_," she said with a "holier than thou" tone dripping from her voice.

"_I'm sorry okay? I was in something of a hurry and I needed silence to concentrate_!" Skye was getting annoyed too, and it would get nothing done if they broke down into a shouting match inside his head. As he raised an arm to rub his already aching skull, Vera lost her attitude reluctantly. Apparently she also saw the necessity. She began her explanation then.

"_The_ _reason you're naked and blind is because you deactivated me last night. While I was overridden, I couldn't do the ventriloquism act necessary to keep them from giving you a full check over and leaving you in nothing but that hospital gown. I guess they figured you were pretty far gone because they didn't even turn out the lights last night, and those florescent lamps are what got your eyes like that when you woke up. What's the matter anyway, did you have a bad dream or something_?"

"_Let's just say, it was a rather enlightening experience, and it has given me the outline of what our next phase of operations should be. In any case, do you know where my shades are_?"

"_I knew you'd want to know, and I still had access to your ears, so I took the liberty of making a high-quality audio recording of their moving you. Analysis points to your shades being set on the bedside table to your left, your cloths in a drawer within that, and your equipment on a cart on the other side of the room_."

"_Spectacular Vera. I knew bringing you along would save my ass a few times over_," Skye praised her unreservedly. He had realized earlier that he'd been being way too stiff with the A.I., and was determined to be more appreciative. It was time for him to put Alice behind him and move on with his life. This was the main reason he didn't just use his own impressive extra sensory perception to track down his sunglasses.

"_Are my sensors working right_?" asked Vera, truly surprised, "_because it sounded like you just complimented me._"

"_Don't let it go to your head. It had to happen eventually y'know," _he said with a smirk on his face that Vera could feel, even if she couldn't see it._ "So what was it that you noticed about that battle the other night? I got the gist of it, but I was hardly in any state to really comprehend_."

"_Right—after your bio-signs spiked like that I'm surprised you were in any state to really survive. Anyway, when you lit up the galaxy with that beam of whatever-it-was, an image appeared within it_."

"_Sure, with such a heavily empathetically charged energy form, a brute-force projection like the one I used could have all kinds of weird side effects. If I'm not mistaken, this particular phenomenon would cause the image of whoever's energy it was to show up, that being the form the empathetic portion was used to_."

"_Uhhh, yeah, okay_," she responds to his psychic jargon, "_I'll just take your word on that. The point I was trying to make was that the image didn't belong to that brute. It didn't even belong to a human. In fact, it was the not-so-pretty mug of Haplipop Bluehime_."

At the name, Skye stiffened involuntarily, shuddered violently for a moment, then calmed down and lay back again. After thinking about it for a little while, he shuddered again, this time silently reciting his favorite five lines from the 2400 verse Tamaranean "Thankful for Life" poem. He had loved living there during that portion of his childhood, and some things had just stuck with him.

"_I'm lucky to be _alive," he told Vera with feeling, then amended, "we're_ lucky to be alive. Those _others_ are lucky to be alive. Hell, we're _all_ lucky this whole _city_ isn't a steaming pile of rubble and gore, if it was really Happy Blue-eye _(his alias in the IDP)_. Did you hear what he did on Rigalop IV? He'd still be on the loose if the 103rd Fleet hadn't caught up with him after he broke the interdimensional barrier in that tub he got from the Rigalopians. Which brings me to the little fact that… HE'S SUPPOSED TO BE IN JAIL! WHAT THE HELL IS A SUPER KILLER DOING ON MY PLANET INSTEAD OF IN JAIL?_"

"_DON'T SHOUT AT ME_!" Vera shouted back, digitally adding disturbing sub-harmonics to her 'voice' that took the edge off his fear and anger instantly. Quickly Vera explained to Skye the circumstances of Bluehime's escape, detailing the breakout at the central holding facility. Absorbing this information, which he had heard about but never really considered (it was way out of his patrol area), Skye was immediately filled with concern for his home. If those crooks had come here… well he didn't even really want to _think_ about how much danger his home, as well as these new people he'd fallen in with, were going to face.

"No more lying down on the job I'm afraid. (Sigh) It looks like I've got some tough work ahead of me," Skye said sadly, reaching over to his left. Homing in with his senses, his hand touched the familiar form of his shades, and he slipped them on before getting up. Dressing quickly, Skye put himself through his paces to make sure he was in good condition. Delivering a series of lighting-quick high kicks and hammer punches, he soon realized that the night's sleep had been plenty for his regeneration to finish. Before leaving the room, Skye went to pick up his gear from the cart in the corner. The doctors had been smart enough to not mess with the fancy looking gadgets of someone who could help the Teen Titans take down something like Happy Blue-eye had been, and Skye quickly strapped it all on, this time leaving off his black long-sleeve and letting the equipment glint in silver sheen on his back.

Walking out of the hospital room, Skye took a quick look around. With the light of morning streaming through the huge full-wall windows, streaks of sun breaking through the skyline of massive buildings that stood between the rising sun and the seaside Tower, the whole floor was cast in mildly sinister streaks of light and shadow.

Considering what his first move would be, he cast his senses into the various hospital rooms. Observing once again the rather sorry state all these ladies and gentlemen were left in after the battle yesterday (though miraculously still alive after tangling with Happy), he realized that he would have to start with some reconstructive work. Really, it was his fault these brave souls had been injured battling Happy, he should have gotten there sooner, and so he felt obligated to ensure that they make a speedy and complete recovery. Also, he could not deny the bond he felt to them, even though he'd yet to really speak to any of them. In any case, two were down with head injuries, and those happened to be one thing he could actually help.

The green-aura young man's injury was really quite minor, and with some quick concentration, Skye had set up a field of mental energy around the guy's head that would quickly regenerate the damaged portions of his mind. By flooding his brain with benign thought energy, the tissues would be motivated to reconnection and recovery, more than likely ensuring that by the time he woke up, he'd feel near 100. All this Skye did from where he stood in the main hall, projecting his powers through the air without ever needing to see the young man he was working on. This projection did catch someone's attention though, and unbeknownst to Skye, a black aura had finished resting and was in a position to take note of someone messing about with telepathic energy nearby.

Occupied by other thoughts, Skye missed this awakening entirely. Instead, he turned his perceptions to the young woman that had been involved in last night's spectacular happenings, taking a good close look at her aura and trying to determine the full extent of her injuries. The damage to her spirit spoke of serious head trauma, and Skye knew that this one would take far more concentrated effort to patch up.

Walking toward her room, he was spotted by an orderly that had been dozing in a corner, no doubt told to make sure the patients weren't disturbed. When Skye tried to enter the young woman's room, the orderly jumped up and began to try and stop him. Whipping up his arm before the orderly could get in a single word edgewise, Skye pressed on his mind with a miniscule bit of energy and said, "Talk to the hand," as he held his palm in the burly man's face. The pressure on his mind left the orderly paralyzed, standing still as a statue in mid-stride with a shocked expression on his face. Skye hated doing that kind of thing, but decided it was better than trying to explain what he was doing to the orderly—and it wasn't as if the paralysis would hurt him in any way.

That obstacle dealt with, Skye walked into the woman's room. Taking in the scene, he saw that word had spread like wildfire through the city, and already a cavalcade of well wishers had made their feelings known by sending in flowers. Overnight, the room had gone from being a completely bare white space to something more resembling the Jump City Botanical Gardens. Reveling in the potpourri of fragrances, Skye saw that all the cards were made out to "Stafire" and noted that for the future. At least now he knew one of their names.

Focusing his perception on her battered body where it lay on the bed, Skye took a steady catalogue of every minute irregularity in her life force. Slipping on his gauntlets, he held out his hands above her and began to concentrate as only a long-trained psychic could. Placing a small amount of his own energy into her aura, Skye drew it slowly and carefully upward until her spirit was floating a few inches above her body. With the utmost of care, he focused power into his gauntlets, extending dozens of gossamer ribbons of thought energy from the rubies on the back of his hands and molding them into a shell around the disembodied spirit. With a long series of painstaking and surgically precise introductions of thought, he patched the worst holes with pieces of his own energy that would support her until she was recovered and then dissolve. Once the holes were gone, he removed the silvery shell and changed the ribbons into two small strands, one from the back of each hand. Inserting them with slow, gentle stabs, he slid them into the center of her spirit and began to very carefully sift through the good energy and remove the bad. Soon he had accumulated a ball of dead, black and red energy that would have taken Starfire's body months to remove on its own, and would have prevented any chance of her emerging from the coma until then. Having given her the opportunity to recover as quickly as her stamina and determination could drive her, Skye gently removed his questing tendrils of energy and stepped away, allowing her spirit to settle back into her body.

With a flash of surprise, Sky jumped backward, his danger sense only just barely allowing him to avoid a beam of black spirit energy directed at him from the door. When he darted his eyes toward where the attack had come from, he spied a familiar blue-cloaked figure silhouetted by the rising sun.

Titan's Tower Med-Bay, Raven's Room (within Raven's mind), a while ago

Raven sat meditating in the center of the planar realm that represented her mind. A dozen eclipsed suns lit the black, starry vastness above her, and the horizon seemed to sit uncomfortably on the jagged mountains that underscored every skyline. Rocks of all sizes floated stationary in midair, punctuating the bottomless pit below her and the endless infinity above her with islands of concrete, finite solidity. Odd birds and other flying animals occasionally flittered from one island to another, creating a sense of life in an otherwise dead and barren quasi-reality.

As she floated far and away from any landmass, legs crossed and arms out, palms upturned, she chanted the mantra she'd been using since her training had begun so very long ago, "Azarath… Metrion… Zinthos… Azarath… Metrion… Zinthos…" her eyes glowing with a sharp white energy from under her upturned hood. On the right shoulder of her hood, a tiny beacon of white light shone out where none should exist. As she chanted, a thin blue streamer fell down from the sky, slowing to a stop as it reached the area just in front of her, becoming a tiny shard of blue material. As the shard twisted and reoriented itself, it came to be an exact match for the shining white light on her shoulder, moving in and fitting into the gap in the next moment. With a small rushing sound and a glowing of blue light, the last hole in Raven's spirit was repaired; she had finally finished regenerating herself after exhausting her powers in battle.

Slowly unfolding from her meditation position, she took stock of her spirit's form, systematically ensuring that every inch was pristine, that not even the tiniest imperfection remained through which some malevolent force could strike at her soul. When she had finally completed her painstaking search, she allowed herself to relax to the greatest extent that she ever relaxed, confident that once again she had survived great adversity, and that it was time to begin preparing for the next challenge to her existence and commitments.

She did not know if her friends were okay, or even if they were alive, and while this bothered her in an insubstantial way (as the prospect of going to IHOB had), long training allowed her to displace the distracting effects of fear and worry from her mind until she was in a position to do something about whatever obstacle was trying to bother her. One of the first things she had learned in quest to submerge her dangerous emotions was that getting upset about the unknown or giving oneself over to speculation without reason were two things that served no useful purpose, and which had to be resisted, if not destroyed altogether.

Knowing that she herself was alive was enough for now, for it meant that though she had failed to halt the brute's murderous intentions in any kind of lasting manner, someone else had succeeded. Chances where that if she had lived through it, so had the others, and so the fear of their demises was only _almost_ managing to crush through her defenses and overwhelm her mind. As it was, she was far overdue to awaken and discover the fate of her friends and the city, though there was still one task she had to complete before she could allow herself this relief (or perhaps horror).

Concentrating briefly, Raven caused a dozen rock islands to swirl from their random interspersion into an ordered formation, creating an enormous flat platform toward which she flew without hesitation. As she landed she focused her mind again, and an archway appeared at one end of the circular platform, the portal out of her unconscious mind and back into the waking world. Before she could leave this place, she had to call for a meeting of her mind, just to be safe. Concentrating again then, she called out to each of the aspects of her personality simultaneously, summoning them to a familiar gathering.

The shadow of each occupant of her divided mind appeared at the same instant around her, creeping each from her separate domain to form a circle with her at the center. As one they each materialized, all wearing a separate colored cloak to denote each fragment her empathetic core was divided into. When they had all manifested completely, she asked simply, "Raven, how are you?" and allowed each of them to make her report.

Things turned out to be pretty much normal. All of her emotions had some problem or another, some deficiency that demanded attention, some drive to which her thoughts and energy should be directed, as was completely natural for any sentient being. By and large none of them had changed from before the battle, and after noting some important new ones (Vain told her she had gained weight from slack exercise recently, also of concern to Brave. Timid was afraid of talking to the other Titans about their recent brush with death and Raven's protective reaction.), Raven prepared to depart. As she was turning to leave however, one last voice made itself heard, a voice Raven was never, _ever_, happy to hear.

"There is something I have to say too Daughter," spoke the vicious parody of her own voice from Hate, the fragment of her soul that belonged to, and had always represented, her demonic father.

"I don't want to hear anything you have to say," Raven responded coolly without turning, continuing toward the gate that would return her to the real world.

"Not even a little prophesy that has been circulating in the hell dimensions concerning you and your little friends?" wheedled the demonic voice behind her.

"No means no, not that I'd expect you to realize something like that," Raven said as she continued walking.

"Not even if it foretold the subjugation of the universe and how it was intimately involved with the very _survival_ of you and your pathetic allies?" said the demon Raven's voice nonchalantly, playing a calm final gambit.

As she heard this, Raven stopped at last, though she still did not turn, and retorted with, "I really don't have time to listen to you toot your own horn father."

"You flatter me my child, but it is not I who will subjugate the universe in this prophecy, that feeble dimension of yours will fall to me later. In the meantime a different source of destruction awaits for you, and what I can tell you will deliver you and those you care about, as well as everything else in that plane of existence, from destruction," she whispered sinisterly, her voice dripping with mocking sincerity.

"Why should I believe anything you say father? I know you seek only to use me for your own disgusting ends." Raven still had not turned, but Hate knew she had her full attention now.

"Let's just say that I believe it will be oh so much more pleasurable to wrench that universe from you fools first hand rather than letting some inferior being take the prize before me—and so I need you to save it for me to destroy."

"I'll save it _from_ you, and from whoever this prophesy points to… so since you're all fired up to tell me… tell me," Raven said, reluctantly turning to gaze at Hate's vicious form. Wearing a red cloak, she was as exactly the same as all of Raven's aspects, with the exception of her demon's mark: four slanted eyes glowing in red rage, one set above the other.

"Since you asked so politely, here it is," and without further delay, four red beams shot from her eyes and entered Raven's. As the vision overtook her, Raven fell to the ground, her father's demonic laugh echoing in her ears.

When Raven next opened her eyes, it was to look out at an endless gray plane. Black clouds swirled overhead, proceeding to the unbroken horizon. She found herself surrounded by her friends, each of whom seemed to be looking at the same something she couldn't quite glimpse. Suddenly they began to walk away, and she found herself standing still as they grew ever farther from her. When they had reached a good distance, a great rainbow-colored pillar appeared above them, vast beyond measure and more than they could ever resist, though even now they railed against its rapid decent with their various powers.

Raven's heart and mind exploded with fear for her friends, her hand reaching out to them as she shouted her mantra, casting a globe of black energy around them that caught the vast pillar. She screamed in pain and frustration as even now she could feel the pillar's weight crushing her power without even trying, she finding herself completely unable to prevent its fall just as all the others had been. Despair gripped her soul as she saw the pillar begin to shatter her black dome, knowing that her failure meant the utter destruction of the only four friends she had ever known, ever trusted, ever loved.

Even as her power failed and the pillar moved to complete its murderous job, Raven felt a hand touch her on the shoulder. Before she could turn to see who had violated her in such a shocking and (in her well-known opinion) inexcusable manner, a sudden flash of power flowed through her body. Filled with an indescribable energy that flooded her mind with glinting silver and moonlight, Raven didn't even have to concentrate for a new dome of energy to appear around her friends, shielding them with a semi-sphere of uniform black and white stripes that held the weight of the planet-sized pillar without trouble. As soon as her friends realized that the pillar was stopped, they combined their powers to push against it as well, and stripes of Royal Blue, Green/Orange mix, Electric Blue, and Jungle Green appeared in the dome as well, causing it to grow ever greater and crush against the pillar, forcing it back even as it drilled a hole into the center and broke it apart.

Knowing that her friends were safe, she turned to gaze at the person gripping her and flooding her with energy. Closing her eyes, she turned her head to face the stranger, then opened her eyes again. The sight of the figure that greeted her was simultaneously beautiful beyond description and frightening beyond reason, and in a very Raven-esque manner, she reacted first to the threatening aspect, pushing the figure away with a panicky lash of her powers.

The instant her black energy broke against the figure, a steely gray haze began to spread from the point of impact, erasing the figure even as it expanded to touch the deeper gray ground and black sky and consume those as well. It began to spread outward then, threatening to catch and erase her as well, but not before she had turned to flee toward her friends, attempting to warn them to run before the gray haze could silence her.

Horror—when she turned to where her friends had been, she was greeted with only four gravestones bearing their names. Gazing at them in shock, she felt her psyche disintegrating, and before any other thought could occur, a red cloud blocked her vision out, even as the gray haze caught and enveloped her.

"(GASP)!" Raven gave a sharp inhalation as she sat bolt upright in bed. Breathing heavily, eyes wide, hair sweaty, she struggled to get her pounding heart under control. Fighting an uphill battle against the panic the vision had left her with, she slowly regained her composure as she sat in bed. Gazing around the room while she calmed, she realized that she was in the Titans Tower Med-Bay, which meant that whatever else had happened after she lost consciousness; the Titans had won out in the end. Struggling to regain her balance after sitting up so suddenly, she slid her feet over the side of the bed and stood up.

Looking around, she found that everything had been done just as she had instructed the doctors when they had first asked. When the team was specifying emergency information back during their first few weeks together, Raven had left guidelines about how she was to be handled when unconscious but not wounded, guidelines that were for the safety of everybody. Specifically, she'd told them not to remove her bodysuit unless there was a surgical emergency (so she wouldn't have to kill them for seeing her naked), and this thankfully had been granted. Retrieving her blue cloak from where it hung on a corner coat rack, she also appreciated the lack of any flowers or other gifts in the room. The psychic residue on these things tended to interfere with her mind's regeneration, and so she requested that any addressed to her be re-labeled and divided evenly among her other friends, who might actually benefit from them. Besides, the thought of being admired or worried about by people she would never meet or know bothered her as much as she ever let anything bother her.

Her contemplation of the room was interrupted by a sudden burst of psychic energy from nearby. Someone not far outside her own door was using some form of telepathy, and it was a complex enough operation to cause ripples in the psychic ether around her. Surprised by this completely unprecedented event, having not felt anything like it since she had left Azarath to begin operating against her father's plans, she at first doubted what she had felt. Standing stock still, she opened her senses and waited to see if there would be further activity. Just as she was about to close them at put what she felt down to jitters over the menacing vision her father had tortured her with, a second miniscule burst of energy flared from a different direction.

Knowing that something was up then, Raven walked cautiously to her door, allowing it to slide open as she came closer. Peeking around the edge, first left, then right, she noticed nothing and no one unusual other than an orderly doing stretches in front of the next room to her left. Stepping into the main hallway, she took a moment to admire the spectacular sunrise lancing through the windows over the distant skyscrapers. Deciding to start her investigation with where she had first felt activity, she turned to her right and sensed around for the imprint that psychic activity would have left in the ether, finding a dim ghost of some telepathic contact a moment later. As she tried to analyze it, a much more pressing sensation distracted her in a big way, with enormous ripples of psychic energy pouring forth from the room that had been near the second disturbance of moments ago.

Abandoning the shadowy residue to investigate the lighthouse of power pouring from this room, Raven stalked up to the door and around the orderly, who was, strangely, still doing that odd stretch of keeping his leg extended like he was about to take a step. Examining him as she passed, she realized with a start that the poor fool was paralyzed, frozen in mid-step with a look of shock on his face. Certain now that there was a sinister force at work, she cautiously approached the room from which she felt that marvelously powerful presence emanating. Chanting her mantra quietly, she prepared a handful of black energy to surprise whoever it was messing about so noticeably behind the door.

Wrenching the locked door open with her power, Raven stepped in ready to fight. Except, instead of some slime-dripping alien or withered old mastermind, the sight that greeted her sudden entry was that of the most spectacularly good looking hunk of man she'd laid eyes on since bumping into Aqualad during that underwater mission. It was so far and away from what she had expected that she hesitated for a long moment and simply stared at him, a blush flushing her face and her heart beating faster as she drank in the sight of him. With a cold snap however, the daydream ended as her eyes widened in abject fury at the sight of what he was currently doing, her rage causing all the flowers immediately surrounding her to whiter as their pot's detonated quietly. Hesitating not a second more, she discharged the black energy in her hand even as he finished and pulled away from Raven's fallen friend.

Dodging as if by pure instinct, the black-clad figure avoided her beam, which instead crashed into the bedside table and crushed a huge dent into its metal siding. With a lightning quick move, the figure whipped around to face her and stared directly at her as she began to charge another attack.

"_What_ do you think you're _doing_ to my _friend_?" Raven asked with a dangerously calm voice, having submerged the initial flash of fury so it wouldn't interfere with her powers.

"This probably looks really bad, but I assure you I've harmed her in no way," the young man's strong and melodious voice appealed, as he held up his hands in surrender, "quite the opposite in fact."

"Do you think I don't know _psychic_ _vampirism_ when I see it?" Raven asked, raising her hands to deliver a crushing blow of black force before the mind-sucker could try to charm her with whatever glamour he was using to look so great. Without giving him a chance to answer, she fired another two blasts from her outstretched hands, trying to pin him against the wall by his shoulders. To her amazement, he faced his silver-gloved hands palm in, showing off two enormous focal rubies like none she had ever seen, then created two round white shields just in front of each gem. The blasts of black energy splattered off the white shields like water, but forced the twin disks to vanish in the process.

"Look miss, I'm _not_ your enemy, I _wasn't_ trying to harm your friend, and I will most certainly _not_ fight with you!" he said with passion, the look of complete innocence in his eyes obscured by his sunglasses. "You can attack me all you want, but remember that one form of psychic vampirism is better known as _empathetic_ _healing_!"

"HOW DARE YOU compare those!" Raven said, shocked that this stranger would have the pure gall to call any power she possessed a relative of PV (psychic vampirism). Again before he could continue talking, she pushed her spirit into several of the dozens of flowerpots Star's admirers had sent, lifting them up and preparing to pummel the stranger into submission with sweet smelling projectiles.

"That really won't be necessary—I mean, this is all a big misunderstanding!" he said, desperately trying to reason with her, though she was having none of it. Before he could make another appeal, she began pitching pots full of flowery brilliance at him, aiming for his head so she could knock him out and reveal his true form. It looked like she was about to do some damage finally, but before any of her projectiles could get halfway to him, he held out his hands much as she had earlier. Out of the gems on his gloves then came a storm of silver ribbons, each curling up and out and each flashing forward like a striking snake to touch one of her black pots in midair. As each pot was touched, her spirit was expelled from it and it fell harmlessly to the floor.

"How…?" she questioned neutrally, surprised and frustrated by this power of his. He wasn't acting like any PV she'd ever fought, neither trying to drain her strength nor crumbing before her assault of telekinetic projectiles as the few past ones had. Pretty clearly the guy had been well trained, with lots of natural talent to boot. And he was so damn hot, she couldn't help but add, with perfect alabaster skin and a matching aura of silver and white that would make a priestess of Azar stand up and whistle—she didn't think even really great glamour illusions could pull off that kind of exotic handsomeness so naturally. Knowing there was more here than met the eye then, but refusing to let this stranger off the hook for something as shallow as his looks, she attempted a more reserved attack.

"AZARATH, METRION, ZINTHOS!" she cried, forcing her aura into the wall panel behind the spot the stranger had been defending himself from. He seemed to notice that something was about to hit him from behind because he leapt forward before Raven could properly strike him with the huge metal panel. She adjusted on the fly and swept him up by flinging it under him before he landed, shoving him out of the room and straight for the huge full-wall windows that lined the far side of the hall outside the med-bay room's door. Before he went flying through the window, and much as Raven had expected, he expelled her spirit from the hunk of metal and did an acrobatic flip from the suddenly falling platform.

The resounding clang of the metal panel hitting the tiled floor echoed spectacularly, and could probably be heard throughout the entire Tower over the course of the seven seconds it took to stop banging around. Naturally then, an audience reached the scene as Raven followed the stranger into the main hallway with light-consuming black-filled white haloes around her hands and white lightning leaking from her eyes. The various doctors that had been getting some sleep after the four-hour surgery to save Robin rushed into the main hall just in time to watch a spectacular duel of mental powers.

As she walked into the larger room, Raven spread her hands out to her sides and vented twin streams of black energy in opposite directions. The beams of power curved through the air and tired to crush the stranger from either side, but this time he used a twisting leap and flip to be somewhere else before they could strike. Letting those die even as she fired them, Raven knelt down immediately and sent her power into the floor, causing a shadow to slide across the ground like a spreading pool of dark quicksilver and get under the stranger before he could land. Expecting him to expect it, Raven was not surprised when he lashed out with an army of silver streamers as he came back toward the ground headfirst after his dodging leap, and that's why her black spirit energy parted around the wide area he struck down at. Having him exactly where she wanted him, the now ring-shaped pool of black energy grew tentacles that reached up and wrapped around his ankles before he touched the ground, effectively suspending him in midair.

With a small cry, the stranger was jerked hard a few feet higher, Raven attempting to disorient him before he could strike out and sever her tentacles of spirit energy. It seemed like he would do just that, (he had certainly gotten his fists pointed the right way) before another jerk by Raven caused his sunglasses to fall off. This sudden situation left him staring directly into the sun, which had now reached full angle above the city's buildings and was coming through the windows with hot bright morning intensity.

"AAAGGGGGGG!" his blood-curdling scream spoke of indescribable agony, far worse than anyone would normally feel from a little sunlight to the eyes. Since she'd been trying to disable him without injuring him for a while now, the sudden scream shocked her into dropping him even as he clapped his gloved hands over his eyes. Concerned that she'd aggravated some hidden weakness without meaning to, Raven walked slowly up to the fallen stranger, ever wary of trickery.

"Are you alright?" she asked when she stood directly over him, a glowing black hand pointed at his head in warning.

"So suddenly we care do we?" he asked with a bitter tone, silver-encased hands pressed to his face as he sat on the floor. "Why the sudden change of heart? I thought I was a 'dirty PV trying to hurt your friends.'"

Raven considered what she had known for quite a little while now, then told him the simple truth. "You may have the power of draining, but you're far too skilled to be some lowlife PV. I could tell you were holding back almost all of your powers, and there'd be no reason for an enemy to do that (_"Other than to lull me into a false sense of security_," she thought). You have some explaining to do, but I'm not going to attack as long as you behave yourself and keep a civil tongue." When she finished talking, she lowered her hand and let the glow die. Taking a few steps past him, she picked his sunglasses from the tiled floor and handed them to him silently. Without looking back at her, he reached an arm around to accept, confirming her evaluation of his skill even further. He could tell where she was and what she was doing at all times, probably with one or another form of E.S.P. Briefly she wondered what was wrong with his eyes, but she wasn't one to pry, and the silence stretched out as the stranger picked himself off the floor and turned to look at her.

"You're an intelligent woman," he said suddenly, having noticed a peeking inquisitiveness under her mask of indifference, "so if you take a close look at the peculiarly pallid tone of my skin, I'm sure your curiosity will be satisfied."

"_Did you just_--?" she began indignantly, her face contorting in another flash of anger that got past her mask, and once again she was ready to attack.

"NO!" he interrupted her before she could jump to another conclusion about him, "I didn't read your mind. For one thing I have better manners than that, and for another your mind shield would take me hours to sneak through. It doesn't always take telepathy to know what someone's thinking you know." Obviously not happy with him, but keeping to her promise of amnesty, she went ahead and considered his ash-white skin, silver hair, and sensitive eyes. After a moment, it came to her.

"You're albino," she stated without preamble, fixing him with her usual cold, expressionless glare from under her hood. Smiling brilliantly (_"What a smile"_ a tiny part of Raven thought), he nodded, walking around until the sun was to his back and his shadow was cast over her hooded face. Sliding down his sunglasses, he gave Raven a good long look at his eyes.

Being a portal to the soul, the eyes can show a person with psychic talents many things. The eyes will give away lies, emotional states, and the deepest secrets of one's psyche to any esper (person with ESP) willing to delve deep enough into them. Raven gazed into Skye's eyes and saw only her ghostly reflection in the completely colorless white orbs that stared back at her. Make no mistake, the eyes held pupils, irises, and all the other functioning structures, but they were all such a uniform shade of milky white/gray that the two eyes looked like twin pools of moonlight during a full moon in August. Raven's own deep lavender eyes revealed just as little, the two staring mental powers both being old hands at keeping their inner thoughts locked away.

"So, now that the pretty lady has answered today's trivia question correctly, I think I'll tell her what she's won," said the stranger cryptically, as he replaced his sunglasses and stepped around Raven, addressing the gathered medical staff (who had been muttering confused speculation about training exercises and other possible explanations for their behavior). "Her _fabulous_ prize is one completely free telepathic therapy treatment for all her injured friends," he said, holding out his silver-gloved hands.

He seemed to concentrate for a moment, rubbing his palms together, then opening them like a book. What he revealed to the confused medical personnel _almost_ caused Raven to gasp right through the calm demeanor that she had had so much practice at maintaining this morning. For in his outstretched hands he held a pile of four glowing black and red crystals that projected an air of pain and rot, which Raven immediately recognized. So he had been healing her.

"This, my friends, is the crystallized remains of the pain and destruction I drained from the soul of that beautiful young woman in the next room. Having patched up her spiritual damage, I can assure you that Starfire will make a full recovery within a week or so. All she needs to do now is have a little time for her tissues to catch up with her spirit and she'll be fine," he said to the doctors, holding up the sinister gems as he spoke. The doctors gave a small round of applause, obviously glad that someone had shown up who was able to do something where they had been impotent, and fully inclined to take a 'friend' of the Teen Titans at his word. As they began to file back out of the room chatting about the good news, Raven took another crack at the stranger.

"How did you know her name?" she asked in her normal neutral tone. She knew from experience that the best way to ferret out liars and traitors was to catch them on the details.

"Gee, suspicious much?" he asked, flashing her a sideways smile as he turned his head to look back at her. "I know we didn't get off to a great start, but that's a little paranoid."

"How?" she asked again, seething at his impertinence behind her mask of indifference.

"Fine. There are any number of perfectly legitimate reasons for me to know her name, but I'm an honest guy, so I'll just come out and tell you exactly the real reason. Basically it's because I have eyes and about half of Jump sent her get well gifts since the battle yesterday."

Her suspicion cooling even as her ire rose at his irreverence, she decided to let the matter rest. She was about to give up on this strange, strange morning and check on her friends' status when something seemed to occur to the stranger, and he turned to face her once more.

"Speaking of names, I don't think we've been properly introduced yet," he said with a grin.

"That's probably because I was too busy trying to knock you unconscious to exchange friendly greetings," Raven's acerbic wit popped from her lips as she was pulling back her hood, before she could give it any thought. To her surprise, he laughed.

"Heh heh eheh heh heh," he chuckled good-naturedly, "looks, power, and a sense of humor too. I'll bet you're extremely popular with the guys miss…?" he let the question hang in the air.

"Raven, just Raven," she said, pretending not to notice his shameless complements.

"Raven, I'm Skye. Despite the fact that you tried to pulverize me and managed to give me quite a shot in the eyes, I still find it a pleasure to meet you." Having finished his greeting, he removed his right glove and held out his hand palm up—the universal greeting of one psychic to another.

Eyeing his hand like it was something slimy with lots of eyes, she hoped he would take the hint, but he simply held it a little closer. Knowing deep down that she owed the guy some measure of courtesy for attacking him like she had, Raven finally acceded, reaching out to touch the tips of her fingers slightly against his. At the touch of skin, each should have received a brief mental taste of the other's aura, kind of like a flash of colors, smells, or other sensations that were ingrained into their spirits and said something about them.

Well, Raven got a flash of moonlight and winter winds, and Skye got a flash of inky midnight and black feathers, but these simultaneous insights were overshadowed by the enormous shock of power that passed between the two at that little touch. In an almost electrical reaction, each vented a strangled gasp and ripped their hands away from the point of contact. A careful observer would see a fading gray aurora at the exact spot their hands had contacted, but neither was in a state to be observant until well after it had vanished.

"I have an idea," began Raven sourly, rubbing her numb fingers with her good hand, "how about next time we want to touch each other, we _don't_?"

"Brilliant—I agree wholeheartedly," replied Skye, shaking his own stinging fingers violently to get the feeling back in them.

As the two stood facing each other and nursed their pains, a taciturn agreement passed between them. Neither one was going to talk about what had just happened because both knew that it was way outside normal, something each was trying to avoid just then. That they could communicate like that, silent speech beyond telepathy, said something about something, but neither wanted to think about THAT either. Then the silence began to grow rather uncomfortable until Raven remembered what had driven her since she had gotten up with a start only a few minutes ago.

"Do you know how the others are doing?" she asked Skye, having no better way to break the quiet that had fallen over the floor. When Skye's eyebrows rose and he looked down, a cold fear that had been nagging for notice during the distractions of her father and Skye came crashing back with a vengeance. "_You really don't need telepathy to read people's minds sometimes_," Raven thought to herself, as Skye looked up again and took a deep breath.

"I got there just barely in time..." he began, and he motioned for her to follow him as they checked in on each of her friends and he explained the story as best he knew it.

Preview: Man, this another one of my favorite chapters. I just wish the plot hadn't called for the two psychics to hold back so much of their power in the confined spaces and confused circumstances. Whatever, there's always future chapters for the two to discover who's better in a contest of spirit-energy. In any case, look for the story to take another change of pace, as I've suddenly gotten the urge to dip into a little horror for the next chapter's opening. It won't be as long, but the need to do some twisted crap has now overcome my desire to be effusive, so deal with it. In all, the next few should be interesting for a number of new reasons, as well as for the same old "highly descriptive and well-written" reason that most have you have commented on so far. Anyway, stay tuned for: Awakenings and Confessions part 1

Review—It's not just a good idea, it could save this story from an untimely end. The #1 way to keep this writer from scrapping this piece is to go back and spend 5 minutes of your valuable time specifying something you liked in a review for each individual chapter. Remember! I love it no matter how short, and my thanks are offered in detailed e-mail format with intelligent commentary for those who give theirs to me, so really, REVIEW!


	8. Awakenings and Confessions Part 1

Intro: Like I said, I had an urge to go horror for a bit, and this upcoming sequence is something of a call back to one of my own experiences doped up in the hospital. Let's just say I didn't enjoy the first night on morphine that much and leave it at that. The rest is just the ever onward march of my story, with a few more threads of the grand tapestry of events weaving into place.

On a special note, this is the first chapter I post as a first-year student at the University of Virginia. After a hectic two days of packing and unpacking, I am now the proud resident of my very own dorm room, along with my roommate (a great guy) and without my parents or obnoxious younger brother. Any comments about a college guy who still watches cartoons and writes for will be met with extreme prejudice, so keep them to yourselves. Enjoy.

Chapter 8: Awakenings and Confessions part 1

Titans Tower Med-Bay, Robin's Room

Robin's awakening, for one, was not a startled leap away from a terrifying prophesy or dream of the future. It was, in fact, far more involved than this, not that that made it any less a welcome relief than Raven's or Skye's had been. Doped up on painkillers, his sleep was a fitful and miserable trudge through a mire of confusing nightmares about him and Starfire.

Some were tame. In one Star was swept off her feet by a Tamaranean prince, dumping all thought of him like a bad habit. In another, Slade had captured both Star and him and would torture him unless Starfire behaved as his apprentice. In still another, Star never awoke from her coma, and Robin saw himself as a withered skeleton sitting by her bedside. With an injection of surreal quirkiness, one had him on Jerry Springer with the episode's theme being: people who marry the comatose and have sex with them too.

As the hours of painful surgery and added chemicals wore on, horrors like none he'd ever imagined before visited him in scene after scene of macabre torture. Fist, Kitten had somehow captured Star, murdered her, carved off her face, and now wore it like a mask as he waltzed with her at the prom. The whole time she kept saying "I changed for you Robie-pooh," and he could only respond "Yes, my love," meanwhile Star's bleeding, faceless corpse hung from the prom chandelier, her blood filling the punchbowl, from which kitten made a point of forcing Robin to drink. It tasted of cherries.

Later, Robin and Starfire sat across one another at a romantic restaurant, dressed up much as they had been at Kitten's Junior Prom. "Starfire, I love you so much, I just can't hold back anymore. I want you to see the man behind the mask," Robin said to her, pulling away the black strip that stood between his identity and the world. When it was gone, a look of shock, then terror, contorted Starfire's face, and she fled the table screaming bloody murder while ignoring his desperate pleas for her to wait. Rushing to the men's room, he looked at his reflection to see what was wrong, only to find that under his mask, he had no eyes. There was only blank flesh where his mask had covered, and screaming with nausea and misery he clawed at the blank flesh until fistfuls of his own red meat filled the bathroom sink and bloody caverns leaked red tears down his face.

Later still, Starfire sat at the table in the Titan's tower common room, Robin standing nearby watching her lovingly. "My love," she began, fluttering her gorgeous alien eyes at him, "It is a tradition on my planet for young women to remove and consume the heads of their dearly beloved boyfriends, so that we may enjoy years of happiness as we slowly digest their mortal souls as embodied in their brains. Might I remove and consume your head?"

"Sure, anything for you Star," he said, leaning over close to her, never even considering denying her what she asked. She grabbed his head and wrenched it off with a quick twist, bathing luxuriously in the fountain of hot blood from his falling corpse. Declaring her love for him once more, she took the first bite out of his skull. He could still feel it, and smiled in adoring happiness as each bite was ripped free.

This went on in what seemed like a never-ending procession, each new scene more grisly than the one before, until finally, at long last, something different happened. He was partway through being forced to watch Slade dissect Starfire searching for the secret of starbolts when an unexpected and unfamiliar presence filled the area. Robin felt as though he should see someone, but he was too disoriented to know where to look. The mere existence of this presence caused the nightmare scene to fade somewhat, and Robin was granted some small amount of clarity that let him hear voices, real voices from outside the dream world he was struggling through.

"His name is Robin, and he's kind of our leader. He doesn't have any super powers, but he makes up for that in but-kicking gadgets, martial arts, and reckless streak a mile wide," said Cyborg's voice as it approached from Robin's left, punctuated by huge metal footsteps. There was the sound of others entering the room in turn, and he soon felt as though he was surrounded on all sides.

"YEOW! Whoa, I don't know if the doctors gave him some acid or what, but he is SERIOUSLY freaking out in there," said the somewhat quaky voice of a male stranger from just above his head and to the right. "I hate nightmares—they always leave this funkified disturbance in the air that's more unsettling and annoying than nails on chalkboard and bagpipes combined."

"Get a hold of yourself," came Raven's unmistakable monotone from the foot of the bed. "I know your powers are more sensitive to thought than mine, but that's no excuse for bugging me with your petty complaints."

"DUDE! Raven? That's seriously no way to talk to a guy who totally saved all our butts," said Beast Boy, in a clear tone that spoke of an injury-free head, mystifying Robin.

"I didn't see him save me, and even if I had, it takes more than that to prove oneself worthy of trust _or_ respect," Raven retorted with the quietly sour tone she used when she felt people were wasting her time.

"Robin told me all about it last night, and it sounds to me like we all owe him a pizza or five after what he went through for us!" Cyborg argued passionately, probably having gotten a good sense of the stranger's personality since Robin went under. "I know you've been hurting since that whole messed up thing with Terra but—"

"DON'T GO THERE!" shouted Beast Boy and Raven simultaneously, surprising everyone as well as each other into silence. Apparently realizing what a nerve he'd touched, Cyborg lost his angry tone before continuing.

"I'm sorry...I'm just saying that we owe Skye the benefit of the doubt. We can't go around refusing to trust every new face that stops by."

"_Right on, you tell them Cy_," thought Robin in agreement, the scene of extreme gore and horror before him forgotten as he focused on the disembodied voices. Despite only being in partial possession of his wits, he noted that he now knew the stranger's name: Skye.

"I agree with Cyborg, but don't worry about that right now," came Beast Boy from Robin's left. "Skye said he was having nightmares right? Heh, I didn't know Mr. 'I'm So Cool, Look at my Sculpted Hair' even _did_ nightmares."

"Hah, yeah, I'll bet that hyper competitive pretty boy practices having nightmares so he can be the best at that too!" added Cyborg, getting into the joking spirit the moment Beast Boy started off. Robin was getting _ticked_, and would have given almost anything to have a chance to snipe back at them.

"You two are so immature—don't you even have sense enough to not talk bad about injured people?" Raven asked miserably, fed up with their total lack of maturity, even in bad times like this. Robin suspected that she was also still upset with memories of Terra.

"Raven, seriously, CALM DOWN. We're just trying to lighten the mood a little, we don't mean anything by it," complained Beast Boy, getting fed up with Raven's nasty attitude. Robin got the impression she'd been like that for a while, and wondered what had so unsettled the usually unfazeable sorceress. "And besides," B.B. continued with a wave of his hand, "The doctor said he'd make a full recovery with rest, so it's not like I'll never get another chance to talk to him."

"I wouldn't worry about it so much either Raven," broke in Skye from Robin's right side, a note of humor in his voice as well, "it's not like Robin can't hear us."

"_What do you mean?_" she asked sharply, suspicion flaring.

"HE HEARD THAT?" broke in Beast Boy far more conspicuously, drowning out Raven's query as he stumbled to Robin's side. Shouting at the top of his lungs into Robin's ear, he said, "DUDE! YOU KNOW I DIDN'T MEAN THAT! I'VE ALWAYS ADMIRED YOUR HAIR!"

The enormously loud shouting made Robin's eye's bulge behind his mask in the faded nightmare, an insistent ringing and the echo of the word 'Hair' in his head dazing him from what little clarity he'd gathered.

"Beast Boy...CHILL!" commanded Skye, even as he suppressed a chuckle. Cyborg was laughing aloud while Raven emitted a sigh of annoyance as she watched the antics. "He's not deaf...or at least he wasn't deaf... he's just semi-conscious and in the throes of terrifying nightmares. I think he must have started to hear us when I began a preliminary probing of the thoughts his mind was shooting off, because I felt distinct anger after those cracks about him as well as general happiness to hear that you're all alive and well."

"Awww, he does care," mocked Cyborg, prompting another flash of anger from Robin.

"Okay..." Skye said, concentration in his tone, "we have anger again, and... what seems like... uhh... oh!—a threat to sell you for scrap metal."

"That's Robin all right, good to know you're still in there dawg," said Cyborg happily, making a toning sound as he smacked Robin's bed frame. Robin was a little bit disturbed, much as he had been all along, because he could hear the tone but he couldn't see or feel anything but the now-faded nightmare. He flinched away from the sight of Slade removing Star's...something... and turned his attention back to the voices, which had begun to argue again.

"I'm telling you, if Skye can bring him out of that nightmare then he should!" shouted Beast Boy passionately.

"And I'm telling you that there's no way we can trust him to go digging around in Robin's mind. We barely know him and he was acting suspiciously this morning," Raven said, not shouting, but nonetheless overpowering Beast Boy's voice with the calmly angry tone she used. Beast Boy was cowed into silence, but Cyborg backed him up.

"Raven," began Cyborg calmly, "I can't believe I'm saying this but you just ain't being rational. You told me yourself that he's a great telepath, and if that's true then the options for him to backstab us are all pretty well moot. If the guy wanted us dead, he could have let that muscle-freak finish us off. If he wanted our secrets, he could read them right out of our minds weather or not we let him. If he wanted us to do something we wouldn't want to do, I'll bet he could even go into our heads and control our bodies. So, I think we can go ahead and at least kind of trust him, just because he's been real polite and cooperative, as well as doing a little something called SAVING OUR LIVES!"

"_Cyborg is on a roll today,_" thinks Robin, who had realized much of the same things the tin man had about Skye's trustworthiness as he considered taking the telepath's help. Deciding to try something, Robin gathered all the concentration he could in the half-dream and made ready to be heard.

(Skye)

HEY

Skye's eyebrows came together as he started with surprise. Having become absorbed in the argument, he was only dimly aware of Robin's mind for now, and the sudden and very clear thought seemed at first like his imagination.

CAN U HEAR ME

After the second set, Skye was sure of what he sensed, and discreetly turned to look down at Robin. Lying under the covers in his surgery recovery bed, he looked as pale and drawn as the sheets, a look highly at odds with his hair and mask. More than a little surprised by such clear thoughts from a person using only half his mind, Skye still responded quickly and politely.

"_Can I help you with something Robin?_" he thought, projecting the thought into the injured young man's mind.

WANT U 2 WAKE ME

"_I understand. I feel obligated to warn you that there is a little pain and disorientation involved in the process. Also, Raven will be extremely displeased, probably insisting that I did it to spite her and forced you to think it was your own idea with telepathy_." Skye expressed his concerns as clearly as he could, knowing it was difficult for Robin to think in his halfway state.

I HANDLE U WAKE

"Can't argue with that," Skye mumbled to himself, gathering his concentration for the somewhat complicated task ahead of him. Thrusting a small spear of pure telepathic energy directly from his mind to Robin's, Skye entered the peripheral areas of his consciousness. Once inside, Skye oriented himself to where all the pieces and parts were, knowing from experience that they were rarely in exactly the same place from species to species (it had been a while since he'd done delicate work on human minds).

Tracking down the section of the brain responsible for sleep, Skye exerted a minor mental force to energize it, allowing it to overcome the effect of the drugs keeping Robin under. As he began to withdraw, a sudden searing pain along his jaw snapped him back out of Robin's mind with a bungee-jerk even as he felt the floor rushing quickly up to meet him. "I didn't feel it coming..." Skye wondered in shock, as his head smacked against the floor and the lights went out.

The lights came back on again fitfully, and to the sound of arguing.

"How could you have _asked_ him to do that?" came Raven's frustrated, but still not shouting, monotone voice, along with the sound of cabinets blasting open and their contents venting into the hospital room.

"I knew the danger, and I knew what I was doing Raven," spoke what must have been Robin's voice from on the bed. Skye began to get up and shake the aching from his jaw, knowing in retrospect that Raven had hit him while his concentration was on the delicate work in Robin's brain. Still, his powers could always detect every act of aggression directed his way...so why hadn't he sensed it coming? It simply wasn't possible... unless...?

"You knew _nothing_," Raven retorted with deadly calm (lighting fixtures cracked and fizzled out) while Skye pondered on the floor. "If you had any idea of what that guy could do to your mind (bedside lamp explodes), what he could find out (foot of bed frame twists into pretzel), what he might have changed or planted—"

"RAVEN! I knew, so calm down and hear me out!" Robin shouted, finally stopping Raven's furious rant, just in time to keep the ceiling from falling in. "I realized Skye was a telepath immediately after the battle yesterday. Knowing that, I took the liberty of pulling out a little something the Justice League dropped off on their last visit."

That said, Robin slowly reached up and grabbed at something just behind his right ear. Fiddling there for a moment, he had gained the rapt attention of everyone in the room. Soon, he pulled his hand away and brought with it a small device of no obvious purpose.

"Umm, we're supposed to be impressed by a hearing aid?" Beast Boy summed up the Titans' confusion aptly. By now Skye had peeled himself off the floor, and gazing over at what Robin was showing his friends, promptly shouted:

"HOLY _SHIT_!!"

"_Watch your tongue or I'll knock you out again_," Raven snapped out mercilessly.

"No, Raven, he has a right to use language like that considering what I just did to him," Robin assured her and the others.

"No FUCKING kidding," Skye said angrily as he turned from the others and gripped at his chest, as if trying to get his heartbeat under control. "You are one devious FUCK Robin, inviting me in to wake you up with that... _thing_ on. I'm _lucky_ to still _be_ here!"

"You're only still here because you didn't try to read my thoughts," Robin explained for the benefit of the others. "According to the Martian Manhunter, who gave it to me, it will only trap the minds of telepaths that take an aggressive action in the wearer's mind. You passed my test."

"I don't find that terribly consoling here." Skye began, taking on a bitter tone as he was forced to remember all kinds of awful things. "Do you have _ANY_ _IDEA_ what it's _LIKE_ to be trapped in one of those? How could you (he chuckles mirthlessly), you've never been in position to face that kind of thing. Well, let me just tell you, if you miss your last-ditch chance to slip out of one of those things—and it's damn hard to manage it, with construction that advanced, hurts like hell either way—then getting caught in it will probably be the worst thing that ever happened to you. It's like being in a box, a really tiny box for your brain, completely black, and no sensations at all, only you and the constant trapped feeling slowly eating away at your mind. After a while, you begin to loose your sense of self, your mind begins to melt away oh so slowly into a puddle of simpering madness and shattered ego. It's... terrible."

All around the Titans sported wide eyes at Skye's description and the incredible sincerity and pain in his voice and manner. Watching him gaze out the window, they all felt more than a little ashamed for having subjected him to the things he seemed to be going through just then.

"I'm sorry..." Robin began slowly, staring at the small device in his hand with new respect, "I just wanted to make sure you were trustworthy—we really can't afford to take any chances."

"If you guys test loyalty with hidden mind traps," Skye responded as he returned to a normal tone, the pain leaking from his posture and back to wherever he kept it permanently iced, "I don't even want to _know_ how you were betrayed in the past. Stories as messed up as that's likely to be always get me down," Skye said, sounding much calmer with that whole episode behind him.

"I still think you were foolish and overconfident to ask him in like you did," Raven continued implacably, putting the pity she'd felt for Skye behind her out of an undying sense of necessity she couldn't shake. "I watched him sense all of my attacks coming earlier, when it looked like he'd been trying to soul-rape Starfire in her hospital bed—"

"_WHAT_?" screamed the other Titans simultaneously, eyes all going wide in shock.

"I was HEALING her," said Skye irritably.

"That's _not_ what it _looked_ like," Raven went on with grim determination. "Anyway, how do we know he didn't just sense the mind trap there and avoid using anything aggressive to dodge it and keep our trust?"

"I'll tell you why—"began Robin and Skye at the same time, stopping when they realized they'd both said the same thing.

"You first," acceded Skye with a nod. Robin accepted with a matching nod before beginning.

"The Martians had great psychic technology on their planet before the civilization collapsed. It's only natural considering they all had telepathy and other powers from birth, but that's beside the point. The thing is, they made psychic traps like this out of material that's invisible to ESP. Skye could sense till his brain exploded from the stress and he'd never find this without laying eyes on it."

Once he had finished Beast Boy and Cyborg nodded at the sensibility of what he'd said, admiring their spiky-haired leader's talent for deviousness even as they gazed warily at the device he sported. Raven looked skeptical—Skye figured that she couldn't sense it with her limited ESP and wondered if his, which she knew was much more advanced, could sniff it out.

"My turn," Skye said calmly as he turned to look out the room's large windows. "I couldn't tell it was there because A- I wasn't looking for it. I never expected Robin to pull something so serious so soon. B- It really is invisible to ESP, as far as my sixth sense is concerned, his hand is empty. And C- my seventh sense, my danger sense, only works on aggressive things."

At the general confusion this statement caused, Skye figured he'd have to explain himself further. In fact, only Raven seemed to understand what he meant even slightly, and her eyes widened in anticipation of what Skye was about to reveal.

"What I mean is, I can sense when people are about to try and commit some kind of harm against me, or when something bad is about to happen. The way I figure it, my senses are attuned so finely to the energy emitted when people have angry or malicious thoughts, or when the energy of an area is coming to a violent head (bad vibes accumulate before disaster and violence), that I can pick them up before they even finish happening. All I have to do then is get out of the line of fire."

"Sounds useful," quipped Cyborg, "If I could do that, I'd never have to worry about another Beast Boy prank ever again."

"Heh, right on," Skye appreciated the great dynamics the Titans had. He knew it was hard to get friends like that. "The point I was trying to make however, was that a defensive device like that would never trip my senses."

"But hey... I just saw Raven lay a stinger to your jaw not two minutes ago dude," cut in Beast Boy, setting up Skye's next comment perfectly.

"Yeah, well," Skye was clearly chagrined, "there you have an example of the exception to the rule. Raven didn't strike out in aggression."

"What do you mean?" asked Robin, half confused and half expecting what was coming.

"Raven attacked me purely out of fear that I was harming you man. There wasn't one drop of aggression in her actions, just undiluted concern for your well-being."

"Really?" B.B. cut in again, "Wow Raven, I didn't know you had it in you!" he shouted tactlessly at this news.

"I don't have to listen to this," Raven muttered foully, flipping up her hood and leaving the room before anyone else could start making wisecracks. The others watched her leave, still a bit stunned by Skye's news and besides knowing when NOT to mess with Raven. When Skye raised his eyebrows in concern about her reaction, Cyborg noticed and took charge of reassuring him (and changing the subject).

"Man, don't worry about Raven, she just can't take a compliment. She'll be fine, no doubt about it. Anyway, you said the two of you got off on a major wrong foot this morning. Something about a big fight when she dropped in on you doing who knows what to help out Starfire, right?"

"Uh, Yeah," Skye responded, grateful that the metal man gave him an easy out from embarrassing that mysterious sorceress. "It's an interesting thing," he continued, getting into the explanation, "because when she caught me at that, it didn't scare her. Apparently, whatever her relationship with Starfire is, the thought that I was doing something to her just pissed her off royally. My senses caught _that_ wave of malicious thought like a bad cold, but it clearly shows just as much friendship, if not more, as her fear for Robin's safety did. I guess all I can say is that you're all lucky to have an ally like her."

"We are indeed," said Robin, lying back in his bed again. He held his hand up to his head and rubbed his aching skull just above his mask, feeling as though something were trying to smack its way out from inside his brain. "You weren't kidding about that pain were you Skye?" he asked as his head began to hurt even more.

With a slight laugh, Skye grinned widely and shook his head. "You really ought to have given that a little more thought. The procedure I used is for allowing people under the influence of sleep drugs and other involuntary slumber to get up before they'd normally be able to. Direct stimulation to that part of the brain causes—"Skye's head snaps around and he looks straight at the room's right wall, "—Woah!"

"Uh...It causes whiplash and gasping?" asked B.B. in confusion.

"What is it Skye?" asked Robin, ignoring the green one's unintentional joke.

"I... I mean I fixed up her head... and Raven used her healing powers... but _already_?" Skye mumbled cryptically to himself.

"Cm'on Skye, drop the suspense and tell us what's up already!" commanded Cyborg, growing concerned that there might be a serious problem.

"Calm down," Skye commanded right back, looking down and rubbing his head much as Robin had moments ago. His posture caused the others more nervousness than his command stopped, but then he looked up and smiled widely, easing their fears immediately with, "I don't know how, but it looks like Starfire is about to wake up."

"What?" "NO WAY!" "Really?" were the simultaneous shocked answers of the Titan boys.

"Seriously, I don't understand it, but that doesn't mean we can't all celebrate!"

"SWEET! Let's get over there!" shouted Beast Boy, rushing for the door. He was out of it before the others could get a word in edgewise, and Cyborg was out immediately on his tail, calling for him to wait up. Skye was a tad more reserved, looking over to where Robin lay before doing anything else. Having tried to sit up in bed WAY too fast, Robin overpowered his painkillers and was now laid out by serious agony through his cut up chest.

"Would you like a hand man?" asked Skye quietly, already moving over to a folded wheelchair sitting in the corner.

"That...would...be...nice," Robin managed to respond through the haze of splitting headache and burning chest pain. Knowing that Robin shouldn't be moving so soon after major surgery, but equally knowing that nothing would stop the young fighter from being there when Starfire woke up, Skye decided it was best to just try and be helpful. He could still vividly remember the resonance of sympathetic souls he had beheld only last night, and the thought of what feelings a phenomenon like that must root from was more than enough to motivate him.

"Hop on," Skye offered, wheeling the chair up to Robin's side. It quickly became clear that Robin hadn't recovered enough from all the stitching and setting the doctor's had done for him to manage the movement by himself. Sweating and straining through the pain, he scooted himself a little tad over then collapsed in pain.

"Giving up already?" Skye asked with mock confusion. After Robin's answering glower, a silent agreement passed between the two, Skye leaning over and offering Robin a shoulder. With the added leverage from an arm around Skye's neck and a gentle tug from Skye, Robin slid gently into the chair, nonetheless fairly shouting in pain as he gritted his teeth.

"Let's go," he finally said, when he could almost see straight after everything from nausea to light-headedness had finished chasing pain through his chest and skull. Silently, knowing that for some inexplicable reason (though he suspected huge concern for Starfire) a man with more pride than the average samurai had taken his help, Skye wheeled the hospital gown-clad masked hero out of the room.

Raven, who had apparently been looking out at the bay though the Tower's huge windows since leaving Robin's room, turned at last to glare at them from under her hood. Her mind shield kept him from getting any sense of what she was feeling, but Skye was willing to bet it was something really deep.

"Why is everyone running around...and _why_ is Robin out of bed?" she asked the two as they wheeled slowly toward Starfire's room. The second part was asked with a particularly annoyed tone, as if she couldn't believe that Robin was so doggedly determined to destroy his body.

"Skye thinks Starfire is about to wake up," was Robin's pained response, "Considering how close she came to never waking up again... I wouldn't miss that for the world."

"What? I just finished patching her internal injuries an hour ago... there's no way she could be ready to wake up already," Raven wondered aloud, finally pulling her hood back as these new events snapped her out of her brooding.

She raised an eyebrow at Skye, questioning his motives no doubt, and Skye was helpless but to note for about the millionth time how beautiful she was. Possessing a noble and spectacularly strong set to the jaw as well as spirited eyes and spectacular skin, she was by far one of the best looking women Skye had ever run across. In her own quiet way (at least in Skye's eyes), she even outshone the gorgeous alien that his spiky-haired passenger in the wheelchair had fallen for so unreservedly. His admiration was cut short suddenly by the realization that she had been talking to him.

"What?" he asked, mildly embarrassed.

"I _said_," she began again, the sound of real aggravation creeping into her monotone voice, "are you sure? Do you really think she could wake up already?"

"Anything is possible... and energy forms like the ones she's venting right now tend not to lie." From his tone, it was clear that Skye was trying play something off, but everyone had more pressing concerns—concerns about Starfire.

"Can we get a move on here?" Robin sniped irritably as the pain ate at his patience. Exchanging glances, Raven and Skye accompanied Robin into Starfire's room, careful not to touch as they passed close through the door.

Preview: Up next we flip tones once more, swinging to the dramatic side as we examine what's been going on with Starfire this whole time. Being such a great character, it's pained me to leave her out so long, and the next big block of the story is going to be my way of making up for that. It's a really long block of story.

All reviews are answered with e-mails to whatever address you posted on , so go ahead and give me your opinion and I'll be glad to get back to you direct. Really, review, and never ever stop.


	9. Starfire's Ordeal

Intro: My, my, my but I outdid myself this time. The eddy and flow of these paragraphs mesmerizes me even now, after I've read it at least seven or eight times. Having been so absorbed in writing them the first time, it didn't occur to me just what I'd produced until quite a bit later. I generally feel that I have not a single drop of poetry in my soul, having no talent to speak of for writing actual poetry. Read this and then you decide, because prose, it would seem, is the outlet for poetry I didn't even know I contained. The appended symposium at the end is a rather abrupt change of pace, but it's integral to the continuing plot, so pay attention and see if you can tell what all I allude to.

An Interlude in the Regular Plot

Chapter 9: Starfire's Ordeal

Eddited by: Attara

After the surprisingly brief pain of being struck by an undeniable force and flung through the air, then impacting over and over again with the harsh stone, Starfire was gone from the world of the conscious for quite a while. It was incredibly easy, with the initial blow causing such an all-encompassing numbness that the later lacerations didn't even register to her already overloaded nervous system. In the end, it would seem that the blow to her body, though it nearly killed her, saved her from suffering the road rash and impact mauling.

Eventually, the sickeningly soft grip of oblivion lost its hold on her mind and she floated gently back to lucidity. "Oh my aching _plishtar_," she mumbled to herself as she scraped her body from the ground. The darkness had enveloped her for some unknowable amount of time, and even as she came to, everything was still jumbled by a mysterious haze that had settled on her mind while it lay unwillingly dormant. She finally managed to open her eyes, and as her vision cleared and everything slowly entered into focus, Starfire was greeted by a world very different than the one she had left behind.

All around her she could see endless meadows of fanciful watercolor landscape. Stretching toward every horizon was a green expanse of incredible and surreal beauty, as if she were sitting in a masterwork of spectacularly colorful impressionist expression, light and warmth reflected in the exaggerated smattering of blurred grasses over the hills. White birds done up with the same blurred color effect flew in small groups from place to place, and every so often an erratic boulder would stand out starkly on the landscape with its deep, forlorn grays and browns. Fluffy clouds meandered through the serene blue skies like mountainous marbled white cotton puffs suspended in the air.

"What a wondrous place..." Starfire said slowly as she took in the incredible beauty of her surroundings. Gazing open-mouthed at the gorgeous landscape, she took quite a while to notice anything else at all. When the enchanting nature of her surroundings finally wore off and she was able to turn her mind to other things, it quickly became clear that something was very wrong.

First off on the list of things she found lacking in this mysterious place she had awoken in was her dress. She was no longer wearing the extremely skimpy (comfortable was the word she used) purple mini-skirt, top, and thigh-high boot combination she'd chosen as her Titan's uniform. Rather, her brilliant golden-orange skin was unaccustomedly constrained by a beautiful, but highly conservative, long-sleeved dress. With flowing skirts and a large persistence of frills, the amazingly expensive-looking dress was still highly functional as far as range of movement and ventilation were concerned. In Starfire's eyes however, the dress's only saving grace from total intolerability was the fact that it was the same shade of vibrant purple as her old clothes had been (she felt it was her color).

Next up for things that didn't sit right with her was the fact that, although her memories of what had been going on before the darkness had overcome her were fuzzy at best, she distinctly remembered being with her friends and that they needed her. Her friends were nowhere to be seen here, nor was any other familiar thing at all. Nothing but washed out plains as far as her eyes could see.

"FRIEEENNNNDS!" she called experimentally across the grassland, then shuddered when the sound, rather than carrying endlessly on the apparently windy expanses, died almost immediately, as if the very grass sucked her words from the air, displeased that some intruder would try to interrupt the eternal serenity of the untouched wilderness. Thoroughly disturbed ("err... I mean... 'creeped out?'" she thought to herself out of habit), Starfire stood uncertainly in the vast emptiness, totally alone.

Alone had never been Starfire's strong suit, and now was no exception. Fear quickly became the principal sensation in her chest as she worried dreadfully about what could have happened to her friends, whether they were hurt or scared wherever they were, if they needed her in some essential way that she was now failing them, if somehow there was something she should be doing that she simply didn't know, and if this was causing her friends sadness, fear, or pain. Worse though, was the thought that had been sneaking up on her since she first gazed upon the wavering landscape.

Starfire may have been naive, overly trusting, and in possession of only modest command of the English language, but she was not a stupid girl. She understood almost immediately (though she tried to deny it) the dire implications of waking to find herself in a surreal and unfamiliar place, Tamaranians having more or less the same beliefs about the afterlife as every other culture. As the thought that she might be dead, gone forever from the company of her friends and loved ones, banished to a place from which she could never reach them again, as this terrible thought sunk in, tears flooded her eyes and wracking sobs built slowly in her chest.

The painful fear overwhelmed her effortlessly, and she fell to her knees in the water color grass, clutching at her chest and gritting her teeth against the terrible ache of loss and failure, an implacable succession of agonized sobs beginning their cacophony of misery. Even still, however, one fear prevailed over every other, drawing out the most bitter and painful sobs of all. She had left the world without confessing the one frightening secret that had consumed her heart for months. The one man who made her feel safe, who made her feel welcomed and appreciated in a mysterious foreign land, who was always there with a kind word and a smile to cheer her when she was sad, and who supported her even in her most troubled and uncertain times, this man was now beyond her reach. She had passed away from him without ever telling him how she truly felt, and the horrifying gravity of this bitter, soul-consuming truth threatened to tear her soul apart at the seams. "Robin..." she whispered between gasps of pain, "I love you."

Lost in heartbreak, she crouched miserably among the wavering green strands, stinging tears dropping freely to the ground. All concerns and worries were gone; all thoughts had been pushed from her consciousness by the pain; she was now alone with her misery, a single despairing soul in an afterlife of empty beauty. However, it would turn out, to her continuing shock and pain, that a kindred spirit was closer than she could ever have imagined...or feared.

As she cried her bitter tears, a change rippled through the serene landscape, grasses turning a wintry brown as the sky took on a red glare, clouds darkening and blowing hastily across the suddenly stratified horizon. Jagged strands of harsh orange cut across the red of dusk, turning the sky into a scarred and bloody mess of alternating painful colors. The birds fled and the stones transformed suddenly from forlorn to menacing while everywhere the gentle winds kicked up to an angry gale. To culminate the change, the few teardrops that had fallen to the earth began to expand, slowly at first, but then faster and faster into a large puddle of strikingly dead-still water.

Starfire noticed none of this, too wrapped up in her own grieving to know anything of the world around her. It was not until a sudden familiar feeling filled her mind that she was startled out of her reverie of pain, the one single presence that truly mattered to her at this very instant appearing so unexpectedly that no amount of pain would have annulled her to its arrival.

"R...Robin...?" She asked quietly, turning her head left and right quickly, frantically searching for the face with which this feeling always went. Seeing nothing but the frightening change in the landscape, she almost gave in to despair again before some mysterious force drew her eyes downward to the puddle that had not been there before.

When she glanced at the puddle, she was struck with the sense of a sadness and despair both like and somehow different than the one she herself harbored. It felt as though these feelings were flowing out of the mirror-clear pool like mist off a morning lake, climbing right out of the water and into her skin, mixing with her own to form a throbbing well of misery that only lost love can produce. Staggered by how much deeper the sense of loss was for its combination with this other, Starfire faltered and fell forward slightly, gazing into her reflection on the still water. For a moment, she saw her own finely clad, teary-eyed image returned, but that faded almost instantly into a view much like a video feed.

This view looked out and up at a ceiling, as though the camera was lying on its back facing up, and Starfire was startled to see none other than the familiar ceiling tiles used everywhere in Titans Tower. Urgently searching for more in the pool, she grabbed at the ground to both sides and held her face close, even as the throbbing ache of despair continued to beat in her chest.

As she moved closer, it turned out that the pool was more like a window than a video, and from very near the surface of the water she could see all around a room of bare walls and stark sterility. Various medical paraphernalia she was familiar with gave it away as a hospital room, and a look from a very uncomfortable upside-down angle showed her an image that shook her to her core. Sitting at the side of the bed, very near to where her point of view was based, was the unmistakable figure of the very man from whom she'd been railing against the universe for separating her. At the same time that her heart leapt with joy at seeing him, she realized with mystical and undeniable certainty that it was from him that this twin to her own despair was emanating, and even now the pulsing of the mated losses throbbed on ever harder within her.

At first she merely gazed in awe at the look of pain and loss on his masked face, terrified by such a despondent visage on one she always counted on for strength and support. He seemed deep in some mire of stinging thoughts, tortured by demons she couldn't know, but somehow that she felt were the same as those that tormented her even now. Even as she watched, his face reached a moment of emotional peak unlike any she'd ever seen, and in the next moment, his lips formed words she couldn't hear, but that nonetheless seared her soul.

Understanding without needing to hear that he had just returned her declaration of love, that somehow this was a vision of him standing over her body this very moment, her heart leapt with a joy that threatened to pull her from the ground. Being so unrestrained, the flash of life-redeeming happiness blasted back all the despair, all the hopeless loss that had doubled up to affect her so, and for an instant, the throb was stopped, and Starfire existed in a state of utter happiness undisturbed by any worry. Not even the knowledge that her own love was unknown to her lover could bring her down from this high of emotion she felt. All that was... all that existed in her world for this instant... was a joyful love more powerful by far even than the combined throbbing despairs of star-crossed lovers.

With a cruelty that defied all reason, vicious fate moved at this very moment to defile this purity in an act tantamount to the rape of the entire world's goodness. To Starfire's startled eyes, Robin's pain mutated hideously from an ache of the heart to an ache of the body, the change being written across his face in the annoyance and surprise that competed with the initial grimace of pain. As he reached for something behind his back, the surprise changed to shock, and he gripped his side as his face contorted in agony. Like being flung from a warm bed into a winter lake, Starfire's boundless joy was flushed away by an icy fear in one mighty sweep of panic.

Panic turned to horror as Robin tried to stand, only to fall back down to his knees next to her, pain etched into his pale features like a grim relief from some demented artist's twisted mind. Frozen in unbelieving terror, Starfire watched unflinchingly as his attempts to cry out for help were stifled by a strangled gagging that painted the sheets covering her with flecks of bright red blood. She was transfixed by the unbelievable horror of the scene, like a deer in the headlights, a mouse staring down a cat, or any other living thing faced with an incomprehensibly terrible happening.

She unfroze at long last when her love's weakened flailing came to a stop, and he slumped slowly forward onto her bed, head lying near her stomach as a slow trickle of blood crept from his mouth to her sheets. With an incoherent sob of raging despair that not even the sound-consuming grasses of this barren and dying wonderland could quell, Starfire felt her heart shatter into a billion serrated shards, lacerating her mind and soul with burning agony as they exploded outward from her chest, creating a pain that knew no accurate description. The stark unfairness of it riddled her psyche with holes just as quickly as her disintegrating heart, and question after beseeching question blurred together as they raced though her perforated mind.

How could such a terrible thing happen to two people that loved one another? What universe could allow such injustice, such terrible pain to befall young lovers at the very inception of their infatuation? Wasn't there anything anyone could do, any intervention that could avert this tragedy? Where was her _deus ex machina_? Where was her cavalry? Who rescued the rescuers, or watched over those who watched over everyone else? And above all else, echoing through her mind without end was: why does Robin have to die?

She felt that, knowing his love requited her own, she might just have been able to bear being separated from him during his full and happy life, even should he deign to love another with her gone. The thought that he would die too, so soon after she had come to this realm of non-life, never knowing that his love was returned by her a thousand-fold, future stolen thoughtlessly by a villain's rage and his own noble decision to place his life between innocent people and those that would steal away their freedom and happiness, this thought cut through her remaining sanity and pressed her mercilessly into a state of numbness that quickly consumed her being.

Her pain was not gone, her despair far from quiet, but her mind simply couldn't comprehend these twin feelings any longer, and her consciousness began to fade even as she welcomed the saving respite offered by oblivion. In a fit of burnt out emotion, her body stiffened as if petrified and her eyes glazed over like those of a taxidermist's pet project. To her wracked spirit, anything was preferable to another instant of knowing the miserable fate of her first and only love and life. The feelings weren't done with her, however, and managed to drag her back in a most merciless manner.

Flooding out of the pool like a geyser, the liquid shot a blast of despair, pain, and rage at injustice that dwarfed the trickling mist of moments ago. The blast flooded over her body as she arched suspended in taut agony over the pool so that her streaming eyes gazed upon the pale countenance of her dying love. As it passed through her, around her, and into her, it combined with her own comparably sized feelings to create an unstoppable pillar of raw emotion that melted away her savior the numbness like morning dew before the sun. Instantly it replaced it with a new throbbing of pain that pounded through her body like the entire Moldovian Slarg Drive was riding across her soul. The throbbing heightened until it felt as though her whole body was one huge heart of pain, beating out over and over again with the combined sorrows of two loves dying in spectacular flair.

The throbbing continued to worsen incessantly, denying Starfire unconsciousness even as it ripped her spirit a little bit closer to complete self-destruction with every rhythmic blast of overwhelming agony. Just when she felt that she could take it no more, that the next blast would tear her mind apart and dash the tattered remains upon the stones, a new feeling flooded her totally with another unstoppable sensation.

Rage. Rage at the injustice, at the unfairness, at the staggering and insurmountable waste of it all finally had its say in this matter of uncontrollable emotions purging Starfire's soul of all happiness and love. With a white-hot searing that blanked out every iota of emotional pain, the rage ripped through her body and wrenched at her spirit. A howl of raw fury that dwarfed any heard before and any likely ever to be heard again burst forth from her lips, describing a pain that was as boundless as the vastness of space and deeper than the event horizon of a black hole. Screeching her fury to the world, she flung her hands into the air with a jerk that stiffened her whole body except her still kneeling legs, holding her hands to the sky as if to beseech some higher power for recourse to quell the unending fury that consumed her being. A slow green glow bled into her eyes.

With the sound of a thermonuclear explosion, twin supernovas of emerald energy blossomed forth from her outstretched hands and flashed out to consume her surroundings in the purifying flames of righteous fury. Stripping away the dead phantasmal landscape, shockwaves of super-heated air fled the straining spires of light as they licked up toward the clouds, until those too were forced to part away from the undeniable melting heat. By the time her initial scream of rage had finally tapered off, her lungs simply no longer capable of expelling another puff of air, the destruction had already claimed a mile-radius circle around her, leaving nothing but melted slag and scorched earth where the green death had passed.

Her rage nearly exhausted, Starfire had only one thing left in her soul. With tears that fairly shot from her iridescent eyes, bitterness consumed her at last, all else having been slaked by the ravaging of her psyche and the purging of her surroundings. Bringing the two green solar flares in her hands together, she smashed them down into the pool beneath her with every last vestige of strength she had left, expressing the combined frustration of two once shining souls in the most eloquent and concise gesture ever conceived for the purpose. The instant the shining fury touched the water everything froze.

What should have happened included earth shattering explosions and the opening of hundred-mile deep volcanic clefts in a swirling apocalypse of green destruction. Instead, Starfire was left empty and aware as the world around her was caught in a freeze frame. She could feel the barest trickle of moisture on her clenched fists where they had just started to enter the water—because instead of vaporizing at the merest thought of touching the jade anger of suns still clenched in her fists and towering up into the sky above her, the water passed by the flares as though they weren't there.

Caught in this frozen world, Starfire was suddenly granted a mind clear of controlling emotions, and the sudden lack was disorienting in the extreme. Lightheaded to the point of tipsiness, Starfire bemusedly noticed the gentle trickling of water across her hands, realizing detachedly that it, along with her thoughts, were the only two things not caught in eternal relief.

Even as she realized this, the new emptiness within Starfire was filled with something, a kind of resonance that vibrated in an indescribable place between her mind and soul. The revitalizing tones of pure sensation were neither painful nor pleasurable, but instead energizing and uplifting without any apparent reason. As they flowed and fluttered though her being, she felt herself letting go, allowing all emotion and tension still caught in her body to flow away on the soothing melody that was played on her soul.

When she had been emptied of strife and pain, then it was her mind that began to flow away. Slowly but surely, her consciousness seeped out of her body through the tiny tickling area where the water touched her hands, everything left within the quickly draining vessel of her form in this place flooding out to the scene where her love lay desiccated upon her corporeal shell.

With the sensation of doing a back flip underwater, Starfire found herself opening her eyes to look at the same ceiling she had first glimpsed in the pool of her own tears. Sitting up, she found that she felt very light, and a quick look down confirmed that this was because she had sat up right out of her body, leaving it lying on the med-bay bed. Her being was now a swirling silhouette of her former body done in a mixture of green and orange light, beautiful beyond description.

Looking to her lap, she spotted the muscular stature of her heart's desire sprawled in defeat near her side. The blood flowing from his lips had begun to pool on her sheets, and was even now dripping off the side of the bed and onto the white tiles below. Staring lovingly down at him, she admired the still noble gleam of the faded blue energy that enveloped him even as she pulled herself out of her body and leaned over herself to get close to him. The sight of him consumed her being, absorbing all of her attention, even closing out the insistent silver flashing that persisted at the corner of her vision.

Leaning down slowly, savoring every instant of what was likely to be her last pleasure, Starfire pressed her ghostly lips against his bloody ones. With the unification of the two matched souls, a slowly building flare flashed out from the two, barely noticed by Starfire, who was possessed of no feeling but love. Love bathed her heart, her mind, her soul, her spirit, and every other distinguishable part of her whole, enveloping her in warmth that soothed. Joy more pure than freshly fallen snow inundated her as she was granted this one solitary chance at expressing her love before both she and her love passed to whatever awaited them beyond.

Interlude in the Interlude

A quick treatise on the Nature of Heroes and the Duality of Fate and Chance

(Narrator)

Starfire had, while in the throes of despair, asked: who rescues the rescuer? Generally, the rescuer, the hero, the altruist, these people are forced to be responsible for themselves, facing their challenges alone by the very nature of their decisions to challenge in the first place. An act of heroism is inherently a solitary act, a hero being an outlier among those without that special spark of bravery, caring, foolhardiness, or bravado necessary to do what others won't. Unfortunately, when one dances along the knife's edge of ridiculous danger, risking life and limb for another, only someone willing to go to similar lengths of risk could possibly be able to 'rescue' you. This of course is why hero teams originated.

Now you see, when these beings who act alone to tread where others dare not band together, they suddenly become capable of watching out for each other. To someone who acts out in more than a totally spontaneous manner (i.e. a rash act of a normal person to save others on a one time basis), having someone similarly willing to go up against all odds around to 'cover your six' is one of the greatest comforts imaginable. The endless tale of the hero shows that only an act of heroism can help one acting heroically, so the lone wolf is very often the dead one. The odds don't like to be messed about with, and heroes never learn that before they try to beat the odds: they need to be sure they can survive the odds beating them. Thus being the odds, it is the fate of all who continually act heroically, no matter how much support these people garner, to die in the act.

The point is, Robin had placed the well-being of his friends and his duty to repay their trust with his concern before the threat to his own life, and for this he was fated to pay the ultimate price. Starfire acted to save the millions that Blue would have killed, as well as to protect her friends that faced this challenge with her and the secret desire of her heart that she could not bear to see destroyed, and for this she was fated to lie comatose for the rest of her natural life, stranded on the in-between realms among life, death, and dream.

Fate, however, is not as ironclad as some would have you believe. In the great accounting that traces our lives and tracks what has happened and what may yet happen, there is in fact a great deal of room for variability. Even though it seems that the course of events has reached such a head that only this or that end can result, and even though the Powers That Be have already acted in expectation of this end, shoring up loose bits in the fabric of existence, still some unexpected happening can waltz in and throw a wrench into the march of Fate. Because Fate may map out the course of all that happens, has happened, and has yet to happen, but blind Chance is a cheating bastard, and just loves to throw fate a curveball and a big whopping Fuck You every now and then.

So it was that we have our current situation. Robin and Starfire were fated to die lonely deaths after suffering for the impudence of thinking they could love one another in this cruel universe of ours and challenging the odds by being heroes. Pity being granted where it was due, the Powers That Be allowed a fluke of spiritual resonance to bring them together for a single instant of pure fulfillment before the end. Then of course, as we all know, Chance had a few choice rude words and gestures for the plan, and allowed his ever-vigilant agent of Fate-busting, Skye, to make a strikingly poetic end into a spectacularly romantic beginning.

It should be noted that when Fate and Chance make a stand like this, it's only in connection with the future of the multiverse as a whole, with the two in eternal opposition over whether things should go with what is most likely to happen or whether the long shot will win out. In a universe moving toward constant entropy, it is always the destroyers, the takers, and the killers that are most likely to succeed, that have Fate behind them, which, of course, makes Chance the perennial patron of the superhero.

Fate had the more or less unstoppably likely success of the Color Syndicate all lined up, maneuvering things for one of its best apocalypse (the ultimate end of all fate) routes ever, as shown by prophesy in every dimension by every being sensitive to such things. In this particularly multiverse-shaking conflict, Chance had outdone itself however, and all the prophesies of Fate wouldn't stop the pure unpredictability that one set of matched souls, two sets of wildcard pairs, and the ultimate rarity, a set of souls in polar opposition, could wrought upon the best-laid plans of Fate.

Now enough of this tirade on the underlying forces of the fabric of the universe and on with the story.

Preview: Starfire's odyssey out of the hinterlands of psychic existence (which all comatose people are subject to before they awaken) was supposed to have lasted forever. With a nudge from Skye and a helping hand from Raven, plus a little something unexpected to all parties, yet another of Fate's dire circumstances will be thwarted most amusingly. Stay tuned, because it's sweet, but far from short. Up Next: The Journey.


	10. The JourneyPart 1

Intro: Here we have chapter 10. That being a big number and all, I wanted to make this one different, so I was going to do a whole big genera shift and try my hand a little tongue-in-cheek fantasy for a little while. I got a little of that, but then I began really writing, and I realized that this chapter was going to be huge, just enormous. It has actually come to the point where you can consider this whole section as its own little story, which means you may get a little tired of it before it's done, but please, persevere. It really is rather good, and we'll be back to new stuff before you know it. Just not that soon.

Chapter 10: The Journey—Part I

Edited by: Attara

NOTE: If Starfire seems more articulate than usual, it's because this chapter's dialogue is in Tamaranean, which she speaks very well.

Titan's Tower Med-bay

Starfire's disembodied spirit was surprised when a force of medical personnel rushed into the room, forked Robin's limp body onto a gurney, and promptly broke the now faded euphoric connection between her and her love. As she felt herself falling back into her body, getting ready to flip back into that terrible plane of loneliness, the thought occurred to her that, just maybe, Robin would survive. After that kiss, nothing, not death nor fate nor an armada of Gordanian warships, would keep her away from Robin one instant longer than she could possibly manage.

That promise settling into her mind even as she floated on the afterglow of the kiss, Starfire was swallowed by blackness once more.

Really, I Don't Know Where This Is

Starfire was rudely awakened by a sudden flash of pain and subsequent burning ache in her ribs. As the force of the surprise unwarranted blow bowled her over through cutting and poking plants, Starfire's eyes snapped open just in time to see a snip of blue sky before she rolled to a stop face down in some grass. Dismay competed with pain in her mind as she noted that it was the same wavering color grass as before, and that she could feel that she was still wearing the overly confining dress.

"Rise and Shine little princess," came an all too familiar, arrogant, female voice speaking Tamaranean. Her surprise at hearing this particularly unwelcome and unexpected voice almost made Starfire happy to hear it for the first time in a long time... almost.

"Sister?" she asked dazedly, gripping her aching chest as she came to her knees. When she turned to look at where the familiar voice of Blackfire had come from, the sight that greeted her was far from expected. Standing a few feet away from her was indeed a Tamaranean woman that looked exactly like her sister, long black hair (intricately braided here) and all. Unlike her sister, this woman was wearing ornate jet-black plate mail with silver chains reminiscent of a highly stylized medieval knight. She looked, to the best of Starfire's knowledge, exactly like the magical knights always looked in the animated 'historical documentaries' (what she thought they were) of Middle Ages human culture that Beast Boy and the others often watched. She thought, as her armored sister advanced, that they came from a place called Japan and had titles like "Magic Knight Rayearth" and "Record of Lodoss War."

"You have an awful lot of nerve princess, calling me sister after running away like that. You're lucky I don't slay you where you sit. I told you that if you wanted to live, you would cooperate with me," said Blackfire, her voice dripping with menace. Starfire was rather confused by Blackfire's dress and speech, she knew that she and her sister were on bad terms, but she had no idea what her sibling was talking about now.

"Sister, I don't know what you're talking about, and I'm curious why you are here. Have you also died and arrived to join our ancestors?" Starfire asked with sincere curiosity and apprehension.

Sporting a confused look on her perfect face, heavy braids of black hair bundled on top of her head flailing as she shook them from her eyes, Blackfire reached down and picked up Starfire by the front of her purple dress.

"Did I hit you harder than I thought?" she asked, almost to herself. "You're talking nonsense. I'm not your sister, I'm Dame Blackfire, Dark Knight of Chaos, and I kidnapped you three days ago from the armed escort transporting you to the wedding ceremony. Neither of us is dead... _yet_. Does any of that clear things up little girl?"

"Sister," Starfire began menacingly, her blood suddenly growing hot with the memory of her vow to rejoin Robin, "I don't know why you persist in this masquerade, but I will not be handled in such a manner, so please release me before I am regrettably forced to hurt you!"

"_What_?" Blackfire snapped, rage and utter surprise mixing freely as her grip on Starfire's dress tightened painfully, causing the unarmored girl to gasp. "I must have truly have knocked you senseless for you to say that. If you think for one moment that I'm going to listen to your threats as anything other than the TOTAL SH--" Blackfire was interrupted suddenly by the very persuasive argument offered by two flares of burning green energy smacking forcefully into her chest plate and flinging her backwards, blasting her grip from Starfire as the younger woman pulled away and hovered slightly off the ground, eyes glowing green with anger and star-energy.

"I am sorry, but I warned you sister, I have more important things to do than play dress up with you right now." The green glow faded and her eyes became visible from behind it before she continued, "I wish you luck for the rest of your afterlife here," almost cheerfully, waving quickly before turning to fly away. As soon as her back was turned, two beams of purple light flickered out and smacked into her back, the impact knocking the breath from her and sending her to the ground.

"I don't know where you learned star magic little princess," said Blackfire, voice dripping with deadly menace, "but attacking me was a big mistake. I am far better than you will ever be at star magic and the battle arts, and I can get nearly as much bounty money for your smoking corpse as I could for you alive." As she spoke, Blackfire advanced slowly, walking rather than flying as she normally would. Puzzling over this, Starfire almost missed the next attack. Dodging the first beam of purple burning energy from her sister's outstretched hand, Starfire launched a fistful of green distraction back as she tried to fly away. She simply didn't have any patience for her sister's strange behavior and refused to fight her without reason anyway.

Starfire managed to get a good head start before a loud laughing prompted her to look back. A quick glace over he shoulder granted her the sight of Blackfire riding up behind her on a huge horse covered in armor as jet black as her own. Its glowing red eyes flashed rhythmically as it galloped up faster than any horse she'd ever seen, even managing to gain on her steadily as she flew at top speed a few feet off the ground. Starfire watched in apprehension as Blackfire's eyes glowed a deep and vicious violet all the way through as she got ready to strike again.

"PREPARE TO DIE!" Blackfire shouted over the din of clattering hooves as she launched another powerful purple laser directly at Starfire's retreating form. Starfire managed to dodge the first one with a quick left barrel roll that brought her to Blackfire's other side just in time for the purple beam in her sister's left hand to flash out. Vision blocked by the billowing of her hated skirt, Starfire was nearly gutted by this one, only just launching a blast of her own in time to intercept it.

Giving no quarter, Blackfire kept up the assault without pause, forcing Starfire though a series of graceful but fervently rushed acrobatic maneuvers. As she desperately searched for some opening to strike back, her attention entirely claimed by dodging and intercepting her sister's attacks, Starfire never noticed the trap she was flying into. After one final pirouette in midair from Starfire, Blackfire shouted in elation and lashed out with a different attack.

With a wild swing of her right arm, Blackfire sent out a twirling and flickering rope of purple lighting that latched faithfully onto Starfire's right leg. The instant it touched her, purple lighting zipped up Starfire's whole body and began to torture her with nails of hot pain through every inch of her flesh. As waves of burning electrical agony ripped through Starfire's body, she had the final fading presence of mind to charge a huge starbolt and whip it toward the ground in front of Blackfire's speeding horse. The gelatinous-looking bulb of green melting annihilation slaged an eleven-foot crater in the wispy-grassed plains literally the same instant the horse's hooves touched it, sending the beast toppling forward with a resounding crushing sound.

As the combined thunderclaps of vaporized earth and tumbling, bending, cracking metal plates reverberated out of the pit, there was a respite from Blackfire's purple electrocution, allowing the forcefully suspended woman to fall gracelessly to the ground. Stunned from the pain, Starfire watched detachedly as a single armor plate slowly spun on its end like a top next to the crater, noting that the whip was still attached to her leg and the slack was pulling up...above her? The implication dawned on her just in time for the ground to shake with another enormous impact. The vibration caused the spinning metal plate to hop the small distance separating it from the lip of the pit, and with a pronounced sound of tumbling and clanging, it made a slow procession down a hidden pile of debris, the variety of sequential impact sounds telling the tale. Starfire's fear-fueled mind clearing at last, she turned from her sprawl on the ground to look at where the impact had originated.

The sight that greeted her at the end of the purple energy whip was Blackfire, bent on one knee in a deep crouch; her eyes closed and face down. As Starfire gazed at her armored form, she clearly having made a spectacular flip off the falling horse to keep in the fight, Blackfire's glowing purple eyes opened and she slowly looked up to stare at her younger sister. With a grin like the devil's own, she stood sedately to full height, holding the purple whip's base up in her right hand. A moment of quiet understanding passed between the two as a cool wind swept through the tall grass around them. There was the sound of that metal plate, which had been banging all along down the junk heap behind Starfire, whirring now as if it was spinning out its last vestige of momentum on its side. It stopped.

Simultaneously, Starfire flung a starbolt and Blackfire gave a huge sweeping yank on the whip, and in a blur of movement, the elder sister showed her edge, the flash of green destruction flying wide as Starfire's legs were jerked around above her, her whole body coming after in a faster-than-the-eye arc over Blackfire's head as she followed through on her jerk. With another resounding thud, this one of bones rather than metal plates jarring, Starfire hit the ground hard enough to leave a small crater, the force of her fall fueled by Blackfire's Tamaranean strength, the leverage from the whip, and gravity itself. When the dust settled, Starfire was within spitting distance of oblivion, and Blackfire wasn't done yet.

"So, little princess, do you see your mistake now?" she asked as she approached and stood over the fallen woman. "You are weak, I am strong. I will always win out over kind, sniveling, soft-hearted little wimps like you. Now it's time for you to pay for defying me. HA! Once you're gone, I can get my bounty, the treaty between the countries will be broken, and I will revel in the bloody battles to follow. I should have done this from the start... Now you will die, and I will be victorious-HA HA HA HA HA HA!"

"WOULD YOU SHUT UP!" came a male voice from the right of the nemesis siblings.

"What?" Blackfire managed to query as she turned to look over her shoulder in stunned annoyance. She couldn't believe that anyone would be foolish enough to try and intercede on behalf of her prisoner. Her concentration was so badly broken by the interruption that she didn't even notice Starfire's eyes gain a renewed green glow. Not that it mattered, since in the next instant, Blackfire was out of the picture.

Without warning, bars of silver light came flying in from the direction the voice had been in, striking Blackfire a dozen times before she even got herself all the way turned around. The instant the bars struck, they emitted an ear-splitting clang of impact and coiled like snakes around her armor, gripping her tighter than bent steel beams over and over again all over her body until she was entirely encased in silver loops from the neck down. The sound of the high-speed impacts was like a Caribbean steel drum in the hands of a demented, speed-hyped heavy metal drummer.

"AAGGH! WHAT?-HOW?-I'm going to KILL YOU!" Blackfire screamed incoherently as her eyes nearly exploded with purple death rays toward the figure that had ambushed her.

"I think not," was the calm voice's response, as another, smaller bar intercepted the lasers like they weren't there, reflecting the spray of death back into the landscape as it closed in with her face and effectively blindfolded her with a wet cracking sound of impact and a quick wrap around her head.

Letters of the English alphabet won't describe the sound that Blackfire emitted when the latest band of silver had strapped her eyes shut. I'll suffice to say that it was somewhere between a jet engine taking off and the tortured screams of a thousand souls wailing in frustrated agony and leave it at that. The piercing banshee's shriek of pain and anger cut to the bone, and it was all the stimulus Starfire needed to finish pulling herself together after the shock of her intimate meeting with the ground and subsequent unexpected rescue.

"He said to -_SHUT_- -_UP_- !" screamed an enraged Starfire loud enough to drown out Blackfire's wail, punctuating the statement with a full power bitch slap to the side of her sister's head. With all the strength in her taught Tamaranean body behind that one single blow, a spectacular impact was only to be expected—and boy was it ever delivered.

With the sound of a wet rag hitting concrete at 50 mph, Blackfire's silver-encased head whipped to the side, her scream died faster than that extra crewman on a Star Trek away team, and a huge pink handprint bloomed on her chin. Starfire stood stock still in full extension as her sister's head bobbed around on her neck, Blackfire's whole bound up body wobbling back and forth as it threatened to tip over. The immense (truly huge--it had kept her from flying after Starfire before) weight of her sister's armor and the new bars of silver stuff around her had prevented her from taking flight from the blow, meaning every drop of destructive force was concentrated on her head and neck. With a gentle gust, the wind added its opinion, and Blackfire fell ignobly to the ground with a clang.

Breathing heavily, Starfire fell to her knees, wide-eyed and ignorant of the world around her. As she panted after the spontaneous release of all that pent up aggression onto the most immediate thing threatening her, she only slowly came back to realization of exactly what she had just done.

"Oh! Sister!" she cried out finally, scrambling forward on her hands and knees to check on her older sibling's health. Arriving over the neatly packaged and completely unconscious form of her sister, she began to try and rouse some sense into her still form, hoping against hope that she hadn't managed to destroy her sister in a fit of escaping repressed anger.

"You really needn't worry about that thing too much Miss Starfire," said that same mysterious voice from before. The excitement of the situation having gotten to her, Starfire's rescuer had completely fled her mind, and now she turned quickly to see exactly who had saved her.

The figure that greeted her sight was tall young man dressed in much the same fanciful clothing as she and her sister were sporting. His pale skin was set off by the incredible depth of his midnight-black robes, which fell around him in sweeping cascades of velvet. Silver thread traced scribbly triangular patterns around his wrists and all along the trim of his sweeping robe, giving him a constant shimmer as he strode toward her. Odd arcane symbols were inscribed down either side of his robe's chest in the same silver embroidery, and these seemed to waver and twist impossibly as he moved, as though they were writhing upon his chest, trying to wiggle off to his shoulders and back. By far the most prominent thing about him though, was the huge, floppy, tanned leather hat he wore. At one point it had probably come to a point, but now the long tip was bent over and the whole thing drooped rather dramatically, casting his eyes in constant shadow so deep that she couldn't see them.

"Um, excuse me stranger," Starfire asked as she kneeled over her lain-out sister, cradling her limp head, "but who are you and why did you interfere with the fight between me and my sister? Such matters of family trouble are not the business of outsiders, not that I am not grateful for your timely intervention."

The stranger stopped walking and crossed his arms over his chest. When his long sleeves fell back, she could see elegant silver-mesh gloves covering his hands, each seat with a huge ruby on the back of the palm. He seemed about to answer her, but a few things occurred to Starfire quite suddenly, and she's never been one to hold back in a moment of revelation.

Beginning with a spectacular little intake of breath, she asked, "And how did you know my name?" Before he could even think about answering, another sharp inhalation introduced her second realization, along with "And how did you learn to speak Tamaranean?" Her third gasp sounded long and deep enough to test the lung capacity of a whale, also containing multiple adjoining irregularities that would have taken a tape recording and three hours to fully analyze, introducing what was clearly a shocking question, "And what is a non-Tamaranean doing in the realm of my ancestors? I did not think I had any other species in my family tree..." It was clear that Starfire was rambling to herself at this point, and the Stranger lost his patience rather quickly.

"Listen," he began irritably, "first off, you are _not_ dead."

"I'm not? (stunned pause) OH JOYFULL NEWS!" she shouted at the top of her lungs, leapt up from her suddenly forgotten sister, and grabbed up the stranger into a huge Starfire-hug. The stranger was helpless to avoid the lightning-quick movement, and found himself being crushed by a woman easily capable of juggling cars. Air pressed from his lungs and taken by complete surprise, he could neither shout out nor use his powers to stop her, and found himself in for the duration. She finally let him down and he slowly recovered as she flashed up into the air and flew through complicated aerobatics in glee.

"HEY!" he shouted, when he had regained enough breath to shout, "I WASN"T DONE YET!" Starfire reluctantly returned to the ground then, and still too happy to land, she floated a few feet off the grass near the stranger's head.

"So, what's the bad news?" Starfire asked blithely, using an ancient Tamaranean expression that more accurately translates to: 'what information is going to bring me down from this happiness so fast that I'll have to hurt the messenger when I land to make up for it.' Stiffening visibly, the stranger continued anyway.

"As I was saying, you're not dead... you're in a coma. This is one of an endless number of dream worlds the mind retreats to when it can't occupy the body." This the stranger said in a calm deadpan tone, as if daring Starfire to blame the messenger as her question had implied. Rather than getting angry though (it really wasn't in her to get ticked at him over this kind of thing) Starfire merely sank to the ground, her body dropping much as her heart did, her expression shattering from joy to blank concern with near-mystical speed.

"I don't know if I believe you," Starfire whispered as she knelt hopelessly on the ground. It was unusual for her to not take someone on their word alone, but these were unusual times.

"Think about it for a moment. When you first arrived you were coasting on the brink of life and death, thus you were granted an out of body experience, and not a bad one by any reckoning."

"How did you—" she began, but the stranger waved her into silence.

"Afterward, you awoke to being accosted by your 'sister' here, who I assume denied being your sister and instead proposed some preposterous and cliché story about kingdoms and magic."

"Uh, yes, but—"she managed, before once again being overridden.

"Then consider your dress, which I truly can't imagine any self-respecting Tamaranean girl wearing willingly. Even me—I'm not wearing my usual cloths either, I mean, it's a neat look and all, but I'm more of a plain synthnar (high-tech cloth) three-piece kind of guy—comfort y'know?"

"That's right—"she tried once more, only to once again be cut off.

"And if that's not enough to convince you, consider that we're both speaking Tamaranean. You've been talking English long enough to do it out of habit, but this world is based off the core of your mind and memories, so it goes by your native tongue, the one you still think in deep down. I know a little Tamaranean, but I'm no expert, and I've been throwing out words I never knew while living there all those years ago. Heh, I'll bet everyone you meet here speaks it just as well as you do."

"I believe you now!" she cried out, the pain in her tone cutting through his rant quite efficiently. She had her head bowed under the pressure of the strong emotions she was feeling, and the stranger wasn't as tactless as to ignore that kind of signal. Her bent form was a rather heartbreaking sight, and the stranger finally shut up and let her say her piece from the ground.

"Will I never see my friends again?" she asked, tears welling in her eyes as sadness steamrolled her determination momentarily. A pause stretched out before he answered, and she used the time to catch herself, her back stiffening and determination hardening her broken face, her promise to rejoin Robin and her friends overcoming the moment of despair that was only her gentle nature shining through. She was willing to do whatever it would take to get back, and nothing, not even whatever bad news this stranger could convey, would shake her from that certainty.

"Now there's the interesting thing," began the stranger at last, in an inappropriately jaunty conversational tone. "You see, the type of coma you have here is called an Epic Narrative Type. Basically, you're knocked out of your body and into some particular piece of the dimension where dream energy and the subconscious mind manifest freely, the realm is populated with beings and entities based on your memories as modified to fit the rules of the realm you fall into, and the road back to your body is presented as the goal of some quest or another."

"Do you mean there's a way for me to get back?" Starfire asked, her eyes going wide with the force of hope burgeoning in her chest.

"Now you've reached the really interesting part!" the stranger said with a smile, as if all of Starfire's consternation and fear came down to a few trivialities of academic interest. It was pretty clear that he didn't feel all this was at all something to be concerned about, and this simultaneously reassured and annoyed Starfire, who felt that the workings of her mind should be treated with a bit more reverence than this.

"As one can tell by the cloths you were type-casted into so unscrupulously by the rules that govern this particularly unoriginal corner of the dream world, you are a bit player rather than a main character," he continued, putting a silver-clad hand to his chin as he spoke. At her look of confusion, he began to elaborate. "The goal of someone trapped in an Epic Narrative coma is never the same for two different people. In a world as predictable as this one, it's liable to be some kind of adventure to slay a monster or defeat some great evil. The problem I spot right away is that you're not in the role of someone who would do that kind of thing, not even in much of the more liberal work done in this genre of fiction recently. You've been given a passive role, that of a captive, and though you did a great job of giving that manifestation over there a good chase, the rules of this world would never have allowed you to escape, that's just not how it works. As long as you're a princess, you won't be able to wake from your coma."

"What are you saying?" Starfire asked, a note of hysteria creeping into her voice as her emotions took another flip from hopeful to crushed. For Tamaraneans, emotional stress like this did a particularly bad number on the mind, and Starfire had had more than enough to be disoriented for months. Only her unbreakable will was keeping her going at this point.

"Sorry, I just meant to say..." he began to apologize, stepping up very close and helping her to stand, allowing her to wipe the start of tears from her eyes, "...that if you want to see your friends again, we'll have to change your role."

Without elaborating further, the stranger stepped back one stride, held out his right hand, and snapped once (snapping with metal gloves on is quite a feat, no?). Rather than the tiny sound of a snap, the motion caused a veritable explosion, a crackling boom that nearly pushed Starfire back, and easily managed to blow over an increasingly large area of grass in an ever-expanding circle around the two. After a the explosion had died down to a distant crackling, the wind finished dashing around, and the grass returned to its normal wavering self, a surreal silence prevailed. Starfire was about to inquire as to just what was going on when just what was going on became all too apparent.

A sudden golden sparkle enveloped Starfire's feet, covering the short-heeled dress shoes she'd been wearing since Blue had lain that crusher to her back and head. With a weird sensation (there is simply nothing else like it to compare it to) it traveled up her body until it had covered her from toe to head. As it had been traveling up her cloths, the stranger turned away when it reached somewhere around her knees, taking a sudden interest in the clouds that still floated serenely by.

This behavior confused Starfire until she looked down at herself, when she realized that the light was making her cloths disappear! She shrieked slightly the instant she noticed, trying in vain to keep the golden sparkles from traveling above her waist. As these efforts proved futile, she threw an arm over the important areas and blushed deeply, even though there was no one looking as far as she knew. When it reached her head, she was left quite naked other than the golden sparkles that still haloed her hair. Starfire didn't know what to do, there was nothing to hide behind as far as she could see, only the all too short (now that she needed it, it seemed much shorter) grass that covered the hills.

Fortunately for the panicking beauty, this extremely undesirable situation remedied itself quickly when the sparkles turned from gold to metallic and began to travel back down her body, replacing her cloths only moments before she tried to fling herself into the grass for cover. The new outfit that slowly coated her body was such a huge improvement over what she had arrived in that Starfire nearly forgot her embarrassment over the method in which it had arrived.

"Are you decent?" asked the stranger politely, when there had been no sound for a long moment.

"These cloths are WONDERFUL!" shrieked Starfire happily, more to herself than as an answer to the stranger's question. Taking that as his cue, the stranger turned to appraise his work.

"I had a feeling that would do the trick," he said cryptically as he caught his breath slightly at the vision before him. Starfire's dress had been replaced by an outfit far more her style, though still adhering to the rather quaint manner of all clothing in this odd place.

She was now wearing a leather and metal two-piece that covered just about the same areas as her Titans uniform, with the top being purple-dyed leather with shaped golden metal plate mail over her breasts and metal links stitching everything together in an ultimately sturdy but scintillatingly form-fitting manner. As was her wont, an enormous polished emerald was set into the metal just below her throat. Her skirt was done in the same violet leather, with metal-linked and studded strips falling just above her knees much like ancient Roman Legionary armor. For modesty's sake, there was a chain mail skirt under the leather straps and a layer of lavender padding under that, so even while the individual strips of leather jostled around, it was only about _as_ revealing as her old uniform was. She wore sandals of a sturdy build, with thin strips of bracing leather twining up her legs, holding on leather shin and knee pads. Her arms were encased in two elegant bracers of a composite leather and metal design, with the metal plates along the back of the arms beautifully engraved with intricate floral etchings, the ends of the gauntlets leaving her hands free. To cap the spectacular ensemble, her hair was bound by a golden tiara with long golden streamers threaded through her crimson locks, which were intricately woven into a thick bundle of braids that fell luxuriously down her back.

"Thank you so much!" Starfire shouted as she appraised her new outfit over and over again. She was floating a short distance off the ground as she twirled in the air and attempted to look at every part of herself, taking in the magnificent bracers and gilded breastplate. A look into her shiny armguard granted her a peek at the gorgeous tiara she now donned, and her eyes slid from that to the elegant engraving on the metal itself. Overcome with happiness, she turned to look once more at the complete stranger that had helped her so.

"Come my new friend, I must thank you for this _glorious_ gift!" she shouted, flashing toward him though the air and trying to sweep him up into another hug. There was a slight problem this time however, because instead of impacting with him and wrapping her death-grip of love and gratitude around him, she flew directly through his figure and came out the other side. Mystified, she turned to look back at the stranger only to find that he was now looking directly at her as he'd been doing before, seeming to have turned around faster than Starfire thought possible. Just when she was about to voice the confusion written all over her face, the stranger began to talk, speaking with an oddly detached voice, like an answering machine or some other electronic device was speaking back a recorded message.

"Miss Starfire, I regret to have to leave you in such an abrupt and rude fashion, but there are a number of good reasons for my hasty departure. One, I had overstrained my abilities by changing your title in this realm from merely "princess" to "warrior princess," and was no longer able to maintain a meaningful presence there. Two, my intervention on your behalf broke many important interdimensional rules, and staying one moment longer would have meant my being caught and slowly tortured to death by the beings that govern those dream dimensions. Third and final, I don't think I would have survived your gratitude a second time, my spirit form being rather frail compared to your powerful vital energy in that place. Don't worry though, I have a strong feeling we'll have a much more lasting introduction in the not too distant future. I leave you with a final token of aid that you will no doubt find extremely useful."

With that closing remark, the illusionary double of the stranger dissolved slowly into a fine white mist, the transformation gradually consuming his image from either side until the last swirling vestiges had sublimed into the air. Rather than dissipating as the still confused woman expected, the cloud proceeded to come straight for her. Before she could even begin to react, the cloud had enveloped her right arm, causing a disconcerting burning and pinching sensation to spread through the whole limb. Squealing in discomfort, Starfire tried to shake and rub the stuff off of her, falling over herself in midair as she flailed, but the sensation persisted despite her efforts, and yet another transformation took place.

Like stop motion photography of a vine growing, a white tattoo bloomed and twined up Starfire's arm, seeming to crawl like a living thing out of her palm and wrap itself oh so slowly around her. Coming in jerky gasps of movement, a thin, snakelike image of perfectly even white scales carouseled around her forearm and up over her elbow, spreading even further then to twirl a few times around her upper arm and creep past the back of her shoulder, along her shoulder blade, then up to her throat. Freaking out now, Starfire emitted a scream of terror as she gripped her neck, nearly able to feel the thing under her hands as it came up on her right side, twisted around her neck twice, then came around from the back of her neck and slithered onto her cheek, finally stopping just inches from her right eye. The sensation died instantly, leaving no trace or memory of it in her body, its sudden absence causing her scream to die just as abruptly. Left oddly devoid of feeling, Starfire slowly turned her gaze toward the stark white mark now covering her arm.

As she examined the snake tattoo, for that was what it was, its silver-white scales traced with supernatural intricacy that no human hand could ever produce, she followed its looping path up her arms until it disappeared over her shoulder. Feeling dazedly at her throat once more, she finally finished by rubbing the spot on her right cheek, somehow knowing exactly where it was, though it had no texture and left no sensation in her skin. Curiosity consuming her, she brought the reflective surface of her bracer close to her face, searching eagerly in the milky image it returned.

When she caught sight of the image pressed into her face, her heart nearly skipped a beat, so much was her visage altered by the incredibly simple yet undeniably elegant marking at the serpent's head. It was oval, and the eyes were mere circles of silver-white within the scaled pattern, but none the less it projected a sense of refinement and taste rather than barbaric disfigurement. Breathtaking swirls of spider's silk-thin markings filled in the rest of the head, so intricately woven around one another that it looked as if it would take a microscope and a map to unravel their secrets. Its forked tongue lay permanently flicked out in a slight silver streak that arced near the bridge of her nose and up to the edge of her eye, so that it looked almost as if the entire mark was a mystical tear that had overflowed out of her jade pools and trickled down her side in a twisting maze of eddying silver brilliance.

"What the _winplifl _(no English translation)...?" Starfire asked herself slowly at last, mesmerized by this unexpectedly regal mark.

"_Well put my dear,_" answered a strange new voice from out of nowhere. The response startled Starfire so much that she jerked away from her reflection and fell backward onto the ground, head swinging frantically from side to side as she searched for the source of this new voice.

"Who is there?" she asked nervously, embarrassed to be caught off guard because she was admiring her own reflection.

"_Another good question. I shall answer it by telling you that I am Caspar,_" spoke that voice once again, the repetition startling Starfire nearly as much, even as it cemented the fact that she wasn't imagining it.

"I do not understand, where are you strange new voice—err... Caspar?" and there were the undertones of panic in Starfire's voice now as she flew off the ground and began to search around from a few feet in the air.

"_My_ _dear, if it's me you seek, you need look no further than your own right arm,_" was the voice's impeccably polite response.

At this news, Starfire's eyes nearly popped out of her head as she glared in shock at her own arm and the spectacular white markings there. With a tiny gasp, her right hand flashed up to touch the mark she knew lay on her face as well. Floating there in the air, Starfire was left totally speechless. Caspar was content to wait quietly while she recovered.

"What did that stranger do to me?" Starfire asked at last, voicing the shock and confusion in her heart without really meaning to. She continued to stare blankly beyond the wavering landscape before her, marked hand clasped thoughtlessly over her marked face. Caspar, as was his habit, answered this question too.

"_Master Skye asked me to guide you and answer any questions you have. His specific instructions where to 'make sure you get out of here as quickly as possible.'_"

Absorbing this information, Starfire slowly brought her hand away from her face and once again looked at her reflection in her bracer. This time, as she looked at the snake's eyes, she thought she could seem some tiny sparkle or flicker of movement. Adapting rather quickly to the concept of having a living, thinking, thing etched onto her body, she allowed herself a slow, bemused smile and once again brought her right hand up to her right cheek, turning to look at the horizon.

"So... you will be my guide in this strange place?" she said at last, eyes locked on the distant meeting of earth and sky.

"_That _is_ what I just said, yes,_" came the voice, the annoyance in its words not reflected in the absolutely prim tone.

"I am sorry," began a red-faced Starfire, making the tattoo stand out even more prominently as her golden skin flushed crimson, "I have been very confused by this terrible place I found myself in."

"_Don't worry,_" was Caspar's response, a new paternal note in his rigid tone, "_It would be my great pleasure to ensure you a quick and safe journey back to your true body and the loved ones that wait for you._"

Starfire was heartened in spite of herself, and a true tear dripped slowly from the eye Caspar's tongue brushed against. As it rolled down her cheek, she choked back a sob, the certainty in Caspar's 'voice' relieving a terrible burden in her heart that she'd been denying since she first realized that she might never see her friends again. A second tear followed the first, but by then the burst of emotion was already fading to calm and confident determination (replacing the desperate determination that had been barely sustaining her).

"I really _am_ going to see my friends again," she stated, as if realizing it for the first time.

"_That's the general idea anyway._"

With that, a long silence stretched out, and out, and out, Starfire slowly rubbing the new mark on her right arm with her left as she basked in relief from the terrible anxiety that had gripped her so mercilessly. The pure sensations running through Starfire's body proved quite an attraction for Caspar, who wasted no time tasting the bouquet of psychic emissions and siphoning off an inconsequential amount for his own sustenance. In this way both were occupied in deeply fulfilling ways. Eventually however, the moment began fade, so Caspar took the opportunity to break in before it went completely stale.

"_As much as I enjoy being stroked by a beautiful woman and bathed in semi-euphoric empathic energy, I can't help but feel that we should get a move on,_" he said with an impeccably polite tone that was completely miss-matched with his words.

"OH!" Starfire yanked her hand away from her arm, blushing more deeply than before and looking around reflexively to see if anyone had noticed. Seeing nothing but the unbroken plains and the quiet form of her 'sister,' a new question occurred to her and would serve to displace her embarrassment quite nicely.

"Uh... get a move on where?" she asked, rotating slowly in the air as she searched more carefully for some kind of landmark or other indication that there was SOMETHING other than featureless wavering hills in this 'dream world.'

"_Ah, and so we'll see now just how much help I can be. Fly up to a decent height and we can try a little psychic divining._"

Curious as well to see just what her unwillingly admitted passenger could do for her, Starfire did as he said, putting on altitude at a good clip until the landscape below her looked like little more than one huge green blob, stretching out to some huge distance in every direction before the mists of the horizon blocked off her view. It seemed that no matter how high she got, the landscape was still identically featureless, and when she realized that this wasn't going to change, she began to slow her accent to a stop. Before she could get below 20 mph, her progress was rudely interrupted by something unexpectedly solid (after all, who expects something solid at that height?).

"OWW! AGGG! OH _DRINGLE_! _PISTAR_ FLABAGAN _BIGRA_! ASPLAP _NIGELSNASTER_!" (This does have a rough English translation, but I'm trying to keep it PG-13 for now)

"_My, my, my, the lady has a tongue on her,_" Caspar sniped snidely, not the slightest hint of his joke in his tone.

Starfire's hands, which had flashed up to grip at the searing pain in her skull, flashed down again to cover her mouth as her face went red with embarrassment. The shock of pain had taken her so completely by surprise that those words had sort of slipped out, even though it hadn't hurt all that terribly much. She floated now a few feet below whatever her head had hit, face down as she winced at the ache of pain and shame.

"_And Nigelsnaster?_" Caspar continued mercilessly, "_Where did a pretty young woman like you learn a word like that? From what I know, only dockworkers, military NCOs, and professional athletes ever use that one._"

"I am sorry... it hurt and... I was surprised and..." Starfire seemed almost on the verge of tears now, her emotional stability still rather shot from recent trauma, which, along with the sudden blow to the head, left her a little hypersensitive. Caspar, realizing he'd put his tail in his mouth in a big way, scrambled to cheer the teen before she could go critical-mass on him.

He began by sucking the underlying energy of her distress directly out of her body, taking it into himself and beginning to digest it as he would any kind of spiritual energy. With the rug pulled out from under her fit, her emotions went through a cartwheel that landed her on the near side of sunny humor, prompting a sudden fit of giggling on her part, cleansing what was left of that whole episode from her mind in a few jolts of pure mirth.

"Umm, what just happened?" Starfire asked, placing her marked hand on the side of her head as she came down from the emotional high (though she still couldn't stop smiling) and wondered at the freaky flip she'd just gone through. The distress was completely gone, and being left clear minded was almost as bad as before, requiring her to consider what the fuck had just happened. In review, she remembered hitting her head, loosing her composure quite badly in surprise, freaking out over some harmless needling from her snide passenger, then going through some kind of breakdown. That's where things got weird.

"_Allow me to apologize. I was grievously insensitive to your emotional state, being used to the relationship I had with Skye while I was riding his spirit. Realizing my mistake and hardly feeling it necessary to subject you to the snit I started you off on, I took the liberty of equalizing your emotions--_"

"You did WHAT!?"

"_Oh, well, it's really very interesting. I used my integration with your spirit force to--_"

"My _question_ did _NOT_ indicate _confusion_. _Rather_, it indicated _OUTRAGE_!" and now Starfire's eyes were two pits of green fire as she glared murderously at her own arm. Caspar isn't dumb, and he picked up on his error pretty damn quick. However, though he isn't stupid, and though he'd been doing an admirable job of hiding it, in the end, he _is_ a bit of an asshole.

"_Calm down._" Starfire was given little choice as he sucked the fury out of her, the emotional swingback leaving her with an overwhelming desire to forgive and forget his trespasses into her emotional state. The green bled from her eyes and one would almost have expected smoke to vent from her ears as the fire died, supplanted by a nearly tearful urge to understand his side of the story and grant him all the lenience in her boundlessly kind soul. The urge was understandably brief, and next she knew, she was once again at an emotional neutral with a clear mind. That didn't last long.

"STOP THAT AT ONCE!" she screamed at the open air. Feeling unaccountably as though she should append some reason, she added, "If you continue to... to... _mess about_ with my emotions—why, we might fall right out of the air should the joy of flight leave!"

"_Don't sell yourself short._" he snapped back tonelessly, "_I can tell from here that you're more skilled than that. This very fact is what makes it so hard to understand why you're acting so childish._"

"Why you... you... PIZELSNOR!" her tone just as childishly spiteful as you'd imagine. At his answering sigh, she realized sourly that he'd had a point, and proceeded to frown deeply and cross her arms in huff.

"_Pouting now are we? Listen, are you going to calm down and discuss this like the mature young woman I know you are, or am I going to have to equalize you again?_"

At this threat, which she for some inexplicable reason _knew_ was completely serious, Starfire clenched her eyes shut in exasperation, then calmed herself, breathed deeply, said a small prayer to her ancestors for patience, and made a true and concentrated effort to control herself. Reining in her overzealous emotions, she pulled herself into a state of calm reason that she rarely occupied, being more of a fan of happy buzz and similar highs. When he sensed that she was ready, Caspar began explaining the plain facts to her.

"_Miss Starfire, I realize the stress you've been through recently, it's quite plain from the state of your energy, so I'm going to be as understanding and patient as I've ever been here. First of all, you must realize that my task as assigned by my close friend and long time host, Skye—you know, that nice young gentleman that helped you out a few moments ago—was to get you out of here and back into a functioning state, which I fully intend to do to the best of my ability, whether or not you are willing to cooperate with my efforts. Second, I understand that your powers are based on your emotions and they are very sacred and personal to you, but I am symbiote, and your emotions also have an effect on me, an effect that can sometimes be destructive. Basically, when you get upset, it hurts me too, a lot, so I'm going to do what I have to do to minimize your pain, minimizing my own in turn. Similarly, when you get ticked at me like that, the psychic feedback into me is also quite spectacularly painful, so I'd appreciate an effort on your part to direct your anger outward, at things that aren't me. In turn, now that I know about your personal space preferences, I will refrain from 'messing about' with your emotions as long as it isn't some kind of dire emergency. If you find any other faults with me, I'll be more than happy to accommodate you on anything that won't compromise my task or my health. Are we clear on this?_"

Starfire weighed his words carefully before responding. In the light of his change of tone, her review of her own behavior, and her utter certainty that he was her only hope of getting back to her friends any time soon, she decided to give this whole thing another chance.

"Fine. If you leave my emotions alone and behave in a respectable manner, I will follow any advice you have as far as getting out of here is concerned."

"_Good. We're in this together now, for better or for worse, so working together is really our best hope for surviving. And don't worry, I'm only asinine when I'm frustrated or in pain, so hopefully I'll be able to get back to my normal, polite self soon. In any case, now that that whole episode is behind us, I believe we had issue with some kind of flying object getting in the way of us and scrying out where we want to go next._"

Having completely forgotten about the bump on her head with all the drama of moments ago, Starfire blinked a few times in surprise before turning her gaze upward slowly. She was forced to catch her breath at what she saw at last.

"Oooohh, Caspar... what's that?" she asked, not daring to take her eyes off the spectacular view above her. The crosscutting streamers of wavering auroras that hung a few feet above her head and continued to some spectacular depth in the sky above her where the only things she could possibly have run into, and the question of how a billion different colors of misty brilliance could be solid was sadly submerged under abject wonder at what lay before her stunned eyes.

"_My dear, my 'eyes' don't work the same way yours do. If you'd be so kind as to raise your right hand up and point your palm at whatever you see up there, I'll give you my best guess as to what's filling you with that exquisite awe right now._"

Obeying without really thinking about it, Starfire sedately raised her hand upward, looking as if she was trying to touch the endless wall of swirling colors above her. When her palm was open and facing the wall, Caspar was able to focus his ESP on it, channeling the energy emanating from it through his body until he had fully analyzed it.

"_Ah... simple. It would seem that we've found the upper border of this dimension. Pocket dimensions like this one tend not to be that big, and here we have its top boundary, currently manifesting as an impassable transverse energy form with multiple subharmonics and tansdimensional oscillations. As well, there seems to be... seems to be... uh... Miss Starfire?_"

Caspar realized that he'd been talking to himself since somewhere around "Ah" and stopped, examining his host to find out just what was wrong. A quick taste of her mind told him she'd been submerged to a semi-subluminal state, willful neural activity brought to a complete standstill, freezing her body in the exact position and state of the moment the submergence took place: flying thousands of feet in the air, arm stretched toward an ethereal barrier. Caspar felt lucky that his host was skilled enough to fly in her sleep (or semi-hypnotic state, whatever). If Caspar had had legs, or any kind of a physical form, he'd have kicked himself.

"_DAMNIT! She _would_ have an optically based sensory system. I've been riding with Skye too long, I must be loosing my touch. Oh well... lets try and get this show on the road._"

With that Caspar broke down the barriers between his spiritual force and Starfire's allowing various connections that he'd been blocking out of habit to slide back into place. In the next moment, he was connected to her nervous system as well as her soul, giving him a two way connection rather than the one way (from her to him) hookup that would allow him to do what was necessary to snap her out of something like this. Girding himself, he gave himself the psychic equivalent of a hard pinch, shuddering as the pulses of pain traveled through him, fed into her, then fed back into him again in an echoing cycle of sting and ache.

As the burn of spiritual discord and plain old pain flashed through Starfire's body, a flinch shook her statue still posture, enticing a wince and a gasp, but not quite shaking her from her blank stare. Caspar sighed in resignation when he realized it hadn't worked, girding himself for a second try. He really hated to think about what he was about to do was going result in, but he'd screwed up, and now he didn't have the option of pulling his punch.

One sensitive to such things would have "heard" the sickening snapping disturbance in the telepathic ether left by Caspar giving himself the psychic equivalent of a strong blow to the jiblies. The reaction was instantaneous and spectacular.

"EEAAAKKK!" screeched Starfire, simultaneously doubling over in agony and writhing in midair, completely blown out of her trance by the searing burning in her intestines. The shock was so complete that this time her flight concentration _was_ destroyed, causing her to drop like a stone. A disorienting freefall of mixed agony and confusion reined for a long heart-stopping minute, Starfire tumbling through the air like a bird shattered by buckshot.

The very instant Caspar was able to think about anything but pain, he forced the feedback connections shut like slamming a window in a windstorm, then proceeded to locate every iota of pain in Starfire and suck it down like a starving man at an all you can eat pasta buffet. Starfire was equalized yet again, the pain leaving a snapback of ecstasy, causing her to shudder in pleasure. For an instant, her whole body felt the way her mouth does right after that first bite of mint chocolate chip and spicy pickled plum ice cream, and it was good. The utter fulfillment caused her to regain flight capability instantly, and she floated languidly, her back to the ground, eyes closed softly, reveling in the afterglow. It had been so wonderful that she didn't even remember her previous circumstances until the voice in her head next spoke.

"_I'm glad... to see... that someone... is enjoying herself,_" Caspar ground out, as though struggling against vicious pain. The sudden voice startled her out of her reverie of pleasure and plunged her back into the present, much to her dismay. Admirably, dismay was displaced by concern the instant she realized that it was him the faint throbbing in her arm was coming from (pain that intense doesn't need connections to transmit, it jumps through the ether by itself).

"Are you okay?" she asked, concern dripping from her voice as she rubbed her left hand gently over the phantom burning in her right arm. Just because she didn't like Caspar that much didn't mean she could sit by idly while he suffered, and she wished desperately for some way to comfort his obvious pain. Caspar would have nothing of it, of course, and told her as much when she asked if she could help.

"_I'm used to this kind of thing,_" he snapped back at her, patience worn by pain and self-reproach. Even though he'd regained a modicum of stability and was able to speak clearly again, he still hadn't forgiven himself for slipping up so stupidly, and now he rejected any thought of sharing out some of the pain to her as he would have with Skye, forcing himself to take it all as punishment for fucking up in such an amateurish way. "_Seriously, I'm fine, so let's stop screwing around do what we came up here to do. We've already lost too much time to goofing off and arguing, and Skye'll never forgive me if we're not out of here within the month._"

"Are you sure you will be alright?" Starfire could still feel a dull heat in her arm and on her neck and face, and it worried her more than a little.

"_I'm FINE so drop it and let's get on with this!_"

With a sigh, Starfire let it go, reluctant to give up on trying to help him but equally reluctant to deal with machismo, knowing from experience with Robin and Cyborg that he wasn't going to give on the point. Deciding that if he wanted to suffer in silence, he could go right ahead and do it, she asked simply, "What do you require me to do?"

"_Great, get ready to engage in what I'll assume is your first use of telepathic energies._"

"What? You mean _I'm_ going to do it? What about you?" and her voice was heavily tinged by the force of her incredulity. After a long telepathic sigh, Caspar got ready for yet another round of explanation. Orientation was _always_ a bitch.

"_I guess I'll have to take this from the top too. Okay no problem, I'll start by letting you in on a little secret: we symbiotes aren't born with any powers of our own, at least none like the kind I have right now. We pick up our abilities from our hosts during the course of our binding, meaning each of us is as individual as the person we're attached to. In exchange for food and these powers, we provide a number of services to the host, among which are cleaning out the spiritual junk and energy buildup as well as optimizing energy organization to increase efficiency. Among other things anyway. Whatever, the point is, I got the capability to scry from years of being integrated into Skye's spirit, but there's a little bit of a complication with actually using the power myself. Through some kind of great cosmic joke against my race, you need to have a physical body to initiate the power, lord only know why the hell for. Anyway, here's what's going to happen: I'm going to provide the power and talk you through it, you're going to provide the corporeal husk and do all the real work—_M_'_kay"

"Please, hold on a moment here..._what_? I... you... _WHAT_?" The final question was almost pained, Starfire's whole face bunching up as she struggled to absorb yet another new wave of information. Starfire was suffering badly from the toll of emotional flip flops, constant flailing from one surprise unfamiliar situation to another, and incessant barrages of new and off the wall information. If it hadn't been for the recent equalization, she'd have probably passed out from stress some time ago. As it was, a single thought made itself heard through the miasma of confusion gripping her dazed mind, and in so doing gave her a focus that helped her weather the rest of it. When she gad gotten her grip back after the stress attack (Caspar refrained from ending it for her, he didn't need a repeat performance of earlier) she voice the question she'd latched onto like a life raft, seeing it as only fit after the way it helped her out.

"Please correct me if I'm wrong Caspar," she began, holding her hands against her head as she recovered, "but am I not also a spiritual being in this dream realm?"

"_Give me a _little_ credit boss. You've got a physical body _somewhere_, right?_"

"I certainly hope so."

"_Well then, that's all it takes beautiful, we're good to go._"

Her last feeble complaint smacked mercilessly out of relevance, Starfire gave in and decided to just go with the flow. Closing her eyes and gathering herself, she steeled herself against the oddities to come, then opened her eyes and asked Caspar to start.

"_Okay, this is going to be easy, trust me. Just do as I say and we'll have to tracking stuff down like a champ in no time. First of all, hold out your right hand, open, palm up, muscles relaxed. Good, now, clear your mind, empty it of everything but the sound of my voice. I said everything. Yes, that means the desire to rejoin your friends too. And the commercial jingle that's been stuck in your head for the past two weeks. NOT the joy of flight—damn, are you trying to kill us? KIDDING! And don't forget to clear out this... whoa, now _that's_ a pretty _interesting_ thing to think about Robin. Hey, hey, don't get mad at me, you were thinking about that in the front of your mind, you might as well shout it in my ear, sheesh. ...Okay, that's pretty good. Now, picture what you want to find, concentrate on it, let your mind flow out to surround it and encompass every part of it. What do you mean _what_? Last time I checked you wanted to know which way you needed to go to get out of here. You don't have to know what it looks like, you just need to consider the idea of what it is, the power has a lot of leeway to read the energies inherent in our environment and track it down bit by bit that way. I agree, it is a weird way of doing things, but hey, I don't make the rules, I don't break the rules, and those are _definitely_ the rules. ...Wow... that's a damn good job, and on your first try too. Incredible. You can open your eyes now._"

Starfire had been getting more than a little tired of him answering her questions before she could voice them, and was glad to finally have some sensory input other than his admittedly pleasant but far too cynical and condescending voice. When she opened her eyes, she looked at her hand. Then she closed her eyes again quickly and tightly, opened them again, and REALLY looked at her hand.

"I did that?"

"_Technically speaking, WE did it, but yeah, you were a huge part of it._"

The object of Starfire's surprise was the glowing scrying sphere that now enveloped her hand. Caspar's body fed into the globe of orange and green light that now encompassed her hand down past the wrist, reaching out in a perfect sphere of iridescent energy to project in every direction. The globe was marked off with measurements that Starfire was sure she recognized from her lessons in stellar navigation back on Tamaran, the evenly marked notches coordinated to denote cosmic location. There were even more marks however, and she had no idea what those ones had to do with anything. Finally, a dozen pinpricks of twinkling light surrounded the globe and orbited it in slow, ever-changing loops that made them look like dancing green and orange fireflies or will'o'wisps of unnatural energy (take your pick).

"It's beautiful," she said simply, careful not to shake or tilt it as she tried to examine its intricacies from as many angles as possible. Her face was lit with a smile of wonder and happiness as she found that even when she did move, the globe maintained its coordination with her surroundings perfectly, moving with her to make sure all its points remained lined up the universe correctly.

"_What did you expect? It was created from _your_ spirit, so how could it not have been beautiful?_"

"Oh...uh... thank you very much," Starfire ventured after a moment of stunned silence at his compliment. She was flattered of course, but she wasn't too thrilled about being host to a distinctly masculine entity that found her beautiful and could read her thoughts and alter her emotions.

"_Honestly, there's no need to get all creeped out; beings with flesh, not even mentioning things like limbs and internal organs, really don't appeal to me. I was speaking of your spiritual beauty, which is as spectacular as it is irrefutable. Sorry for sounding like some kind of pervert spirit symbiote, I was just appreciating the difference between being integrated with a beauty like you and that utilitarian ice-king Skye. That guy's so cold his scry sphere has icicles dripping off of it. Or at least that's the way he acts anyway. Sometimes._"

A long pause stretches out and Starfire wonders what the heck he's talking about, even as her curiosity is piqued by his snippets of information about her mysterious rescuer. Now that the wonder of her situation was wearing off, relevant questions were cropping up in her mind every minute. She was about to begin asking some when Caspar beat her out for conversational initiative.

"_What was I talking about? DAMN! I don't know if it's the throbbing pain or some kind of weirdo effect of switching hosts, but I haven't been able to concentrate properly since I got here. Oh yeah._"

Caspar's murmur of realization came as a direct result of the wisps of light around Starfire's scry sphere bursting with activity. Swirling further and further away from the sphere itself, they became a blur of motion, appearing to transform into solid rings of orange and green light as they zipped around her hand. With a last flash of light, the snapped back to her hand in the blink of an eye, wrapping into the center of the sphere before flashing out once more to form a single, three inch spike, floating freely an inch away from the sphere's surface. It was pointing at something.

"_And there you have it. We began this escapade when you asked me 'get a move on where?' You can't get much more directed than _that"

"But wait! That direction is the same as every other one!" Starfire complained, expecting something far more dramatic than an arrow considering all the stuff she just went through. There was almost a whine in her voice as the anticlimax really got to her.

"_Oh, is it now? Take another look beautiful, I think you'll be impressed yet._"

Not comprehending and still more than a little put out by just how little all her effort had resulted in, she cast her frustrated eyes toward the general area the arrow indicated. She had to look twice to be sure.

"I do not understand! That forest was NOT there before!" she was frustrated on the outside, not appreciating one bit this world's habit of being against her on every point. Deep down though, she was just glad that they'd made some real progress for once. Thus, she wasn't too annoyed when her passenger had an ass relapse, again.

"_You're right, it wasn't there, but it's there now, so let's get moving alright? I have no desire to spend the rest of eternity in this backwater place. Even with a gourmet hostess like you, I truly have places I'd rather be._"

"Why do you call me 'gourmet'?" She once again managed to latch onto the most thoughtlessly damaging part of his statement. "For that matter, what exactly did you mean when your host gives you food? I do not have any food for you, and I do not believe a spiritual symbiote would be interested in sharing any of what I eat anyway. The other Titans certainly never are." The last she said while remembering the way Beast Boy had looked at her when she'd put caramel on her taco salad. Or the time she'd asked Robin to get her a rocksalt, mustard, and tapioca sunday at the park. The list went on and on really.

"_Great question. Or rather, great question for another time. Let's go now._"

Starfire frowned annoyedly at his evasion. She may need the ethereal smart mouth's help to get out of here, but she knew for a fact that SHE was HIS hostess, and she didn't have to take crap like that from him. Deciding to take the initiative after a far too long period of being a helpless damsel (even after her change of clothing and rolls in this whacked out realm), she felt herself harden in determination, putting on her best mean face (she didn't have many, truly preferring a happy demeanor).

"Now listen you," she started calmly but implacably, keeping entirely cool in her anger so as to give him no excuse to equalize her, "'another time' had better be while were flying to our new destination, or there _will_ be _consequences_, do you understand?"

Caspar was stunned, stupefied even. He thought he'd had this girl figured out, but apparently, there really was more to her than the insecure, out of place, just barely maturing waif of a girl he'd bound with when he first arrived. He contemplated the horror of the experience that had made the stalwart and unwavering figure attached to him right now seem the way she had even for a little while, then gave up on the impossible and let it go. It seemed that he was doomed to be the subordinate in this symbiosis too.

"_Well_?" she prompted him out of his contemplations ruthlessly.

"_Hey, you're the boss, Miss Starfire._" he responded quickly, deciding to quit while he was ahead and swallow his power bid for superiority, "_As long as we're making progress toward Master Skye's orders, I'll do whatever you want._"

"WONDERFULL! Caspar, I believe I'm ready to call you my newest friend!" Starfire's exclamation marked something: a change. Since she'd arrived, she'd been shunted around by forces beyond her understanding, manipulated, manhandled, and just plain violated by things she could neither combat nor control, and it had had a toll on her. The entire time she'd been here so far, she'd been freaking out on emotions that just weren't hers, either from an outside force or self-imposition in her overwhelming grim determination. With that familiar shout, Starfire had finally become Starfire again, her mind at last sliding into that glorious bubbling happiness that was the totally natural ground state of the energetic young woman's psyche. Feeling more calm, confident, warm, and just plain happy than she had since she'd arrived in her soul's prison, Starfire wrapped her arms up close against her metal breastplate and gave herself (and Caspar in the process) a huge hug.

The arrow on her scry sphere wobbled gently as it stayed pointing in the exact same direction and Starfire moved around, rocking slowly as she basked in happiness that was truly her own. The incredible force of the joy pressed on Caspar as much as the hug would have any physical being, proving that no one was immune to the rather painful extent to which Starfire was capable of loving others. Finally truly ready, she began to accelerate in the direction the arrow pointed, flight all the easier now that she was doing it from fresh feeling rather than by force of long practice. As she flashed though the air, a warrior princess on the way to complete her quest and rejoin her loved ones, the innate practicality of her deeper side took a moment to get even with Caspar for taking advantage of her earlier confusion.

"So, what exactly was it that you eat?"

Post Story Rant:

I truly didn't want to divide this chapter into two parts, it kind of defeats the purpose of having it as an interlude in the regular storyline, plus it just plain looks funny to have a multi-part interruption (which are supposed to be short, right?). Oh well, I just had too much fun with this to cut it short (I'm seriously considering an AU story with a theme like this now) and I didn't want to subject anyone to a 20,000 word chapter on the internet (my own eye-burn cap comes in at around 8-9 thousand per chapter), so here we have a break to rest the eyes before the next section. On an unrelated note, my own mental images of these characters (plus those to come in the next chapter) strike me as so neat that I wish, not for the first time, that I had even a single iota of artistic talent so I could draw them. My mental image of fantasy-based Titans just looks really damn cool to me, and so I'm left to lament my inability to grasp even the most elementary precepts of illustration once again. Oh well.

Preview: The next chapter shall bring (I promise this time) an amusingly shallow fantasy plot with all the gravy that genre is so famous for. Also, the butt kicking shall be spectacular. The butts will be kicked to the right, the butts will be kicked to the left, and just for a change, the butts will be kicked around in circles (both clockwise and counter). Best of all, it will be entirely Titan-centric, so anyone getting annoyed by OC-centricity will get a little respite. Caspar will have his moments, but his position promises sidekickism in a big way. In any case, the Journey continues (and probably ends) next, with: The Journey—Part II.


	11. The Journey Part 2

Into: Okay, Okay, I can explain everybody, just chill. It turns out that I got a little more involved in this section of the story than I planned, so it's going to be longer still than I ever expected. On a happy note, it turned out really good, so it shouldn't be a total chore to read it unless you have some weird obsession with my original story line. In retrospect, I probably should have reserved my desire to write this kind of story for A DIFFERENT STORY, but oh well. Also I made some half-assed promises about butt kicking and fantasy lampooning a while back. Well, the butt kicking wound up in the next chapter for the most part, and the lampooning never seriously materialized. I set out to make fun of fantasy, but instead would up winding a halfway decent yarn. Once again, oh well. Enjoy.

Chapter 11: The Journey--Part 2

"The needle points directly below us now." Starfire commented out of hand as she slowed to a stop in midair. The pair had been flying for quite a while, but with no way of telling time in this world, she really didn't know how much distance they'd covered. Instead, a quick look around confirmed that vibrant green forest surrounded her just as completely as the wavering plains of however long ago had. The wavering color effect, which she had kind of assumed was standard to the dream world, was actually a feature of that strange grassland, and the trees that now surrounded her were no different than any she'd ever seen on earth, if somewhat larger and denser than any that she'd seen personally.

"_Great, let's head down and check it out. Careful though, places like this are riddled with danger._"

"Right," and she proceeded to float gently down into the dense canopy of treetops, doing her best not to make too much noise as she lighted on the topmost branches. Minimizing the rustling as best she could, she half flew, half climbed down the huge branches of the nearest tree, coming at last to a break in the woody barriers. It was far darker down beneath the tree branches, the cool shade casting a pall over matted green moss on rocks and a seemingly endless blanket of fallen leaves. The twined smells of musty decay and green lively freshness competed fiercely as a slow breeze rustled the endless leaves against one another, telling a tale of the endless cycle of life and death that spoke of a healthy forest. As she slowly floated closer to the bed of rotting leaves that coated the forest floor, flying slightly above it to avoid the many unpleasant critters that no doubt called the vast compost home, her every sense was on a knife's edge, alert for any threat that might present itself now that she approached her first objective in the 'quest' that would take her home.

"_You might want to put out the light._" Caspar said, using a tone that was less snide than it was admonitory. He'd had an attitude adjustment over the journey here, and was now at least helpful if not exactly polite. They'd had a very long discussion about quite a few different things, and Caspar was now more than a little inclined to keep a cap on his less kind impulses, having gained an entirely new respect for the character of his host. Starfire meanwhile had managed to come to terms with the fact that a negligible amount of her spirit energy, the same energy that would be wasted by projecting off into space naturally, was now the food of her passenger; meaning that her emotions, something sacred to her beyond more or less anything else, were now something else's dinner. It hadn't been easy, but efforts on both sides had prevailed, and the two were closer now than one would have expected entities of their specific personalities to be capable of.

"Right," Starfire confirmed once again, responding to his reminder by looking at the glowing sphere in her right hand and memorizing the direction it pointed (currently through some brush just ahead of her) before concentrating on dispelling it as Caspar had instructed her earlier. When she had successfully submerged the construction in her mind, she flipped her hand over and closed it, causing the sphere to douse instantly, leaving the area suddenly devoid of its gentle green and orange glow.

"_Perfectly done. Now I can monitor it for you while it continues to track where you need to go to get out of here and you don't have to worry about one of your hands glowing like a neon lamp. ... Not to say that you wouldn't be _used_ to your hands glowing._"

"No offence taken friend," she whispered as she floated slowly and discreetly toward the underbrush that stood between her and her objective. Caspar had explained to her that she need not speak out loud for him to hear her, considering that it wasn't the sound of her words that he was listening to at all (no ears), rather her thoughts of them, but after some practice at subvocalizing, she decided that she'd rather just talk (she just couldn't quite believe that he was hearing her) if there wasn't some dire need for silence (this wasn't dire—not yet anyway). Approaching the bushes, she floated horizontally a few inches off the leafy floor and parted a small hole in the bush in front of her with her hands, giving her a decent view of what lie beyond.

What lie beyond turned out to be a picturesque little clearing surrounding a tiny natural pond in the forest. The clearing was so small that the overreaching branches of many healthy trees competing for limited sunlight managed to cover it almost totally in shade as complete as anywhere else in the forest. As it was, only a small beam of sunlight cut down though the branches, slicing the air with a bright streak of illumination that stood out like a beacon in the dim forest. At this hour of the day, the beam struck the crystal water below like a single pillar of brightness, scattering from its point of impact on the calm water and casting a billion wavering reflections on the trees around the pond. The effect was almost magical, creating a clearing that danced with light and smelled sweetly of wildflowers that thrived on the pond's edge, sucking up sunlight that the trees would otherwise steal away as their own. It was a sight of immense natural beauty, and Starfire sighed as she took it all in, her time on earth allowing her to appreciate the rarity of the scene before her (though deep down, she still preferred the majestic icescapes of her homeworld).

Her eyes had been so drawn by the beauty of the clearing that it was a long moment before she noticed its occupants. Sitting at the pool's edge was a pretty young blond girl wearing a dress reminiscent of the one she'd arrived in, only made of a sparkling white fabric rather than the purple hers had been. The young woman was also wearing a golden tiara not unlike Starfire's own, and this pretty well gave her away as being a princess. Next to her, standing up to its waist in the pond water, was the largest frog Starfire had ever seen. From its posture she could tell it stood on two legs like a man and had a humanoid form roughly four foot five inches tall, but its huge frog head and totally green body made it hard to refute its basic frog-like nature. The two seemed to be engrossed in conversation... or at least, the girl seemed to be talking to the frog, who nodded or shook his head as she spoke.

"So you really _are_ a prince transformed into a frog-man by the spell of a wicked witch?" asked the girl in a slightly doubtful tone, wearing a nervous coy expression as she leaned away from the rather hideous visage before her. The frog-man nodded fiercely, causing his googly eyes to wander around in their sockets.

"And all I need to do is give you a kiss and you'll change back into a handsome prince and we can live happily ever after?" The frog-man greeted this second question with an ever greater fit of nodding, as if he eagerly awaited the touch of the fair young woman's lips.

"Weeeellll," her voice stretched out in rather air-headedly feigned consideration, but it was clear from her demeanor that she'd already decided, "Okay. Come a little closer and I'll give you a kiss, but there had better be white horses and enchanted castles in the deal, or you'll regret it!" The frog-man ignored her threat and eagerly leaned forward, bulgy eyes nearly popping out of his head as he tensed in excitement.

"_Hostiles, ten of them, closing in from all around_." Caspar prompted Starfire nonchalantly, his E.S.P. picking them up only now as they became aggressive (he wasn't as good as Skye by far, unfortunately). Reacting instantly, Starfire pulled away from the bush and floated herself under the brush she'd been peaking through, concealing herself among the dense foliage so she was invisible from either side. Tensing now for anything that might come, she turned her gaze once more into the enchanted clearing.

The Princess was puckered up, eyes closed as she slowly inched closer to the freakish thing that leaned out of the sparkling water. Apparently her sense of dramatic tension wouldn't allow her to just hurry up and get it over with, and this is what allowed the situation to get as messed up as it did as quickly as it did.

"THERE you are beastly one, I've been looking _EVERYWHERE_ for you," came the sarcastic voice of a stranger from the opposite end of the clearing, all done up in a singsong tone that barely concealed volumes of menace. The voice started the princess out of her kiss preparation, causing her to jerk back and jump away from the sound, leaving the frog-man high and dry on the pools edge. The voice was no less of a surprise to him, and as he dragged himself off the pool's edge, his body _changed_, even though he'd never been touched by the pretty girl's lips. After a moment of almost imperceptibly swift rippling and writhing of green flesh, Starfire caught sight of some familiar short hair from behind, and the implications of the green silhouette before her caused her to gasp softly from her hiding place. The Princess was much less happy when the frog-prince she'd been about to rescue transformed with no help from her, and the façade of blond bubble-headedness that she'd expertly played so far evaporated in her burst of rage.

"_WHAT_? YOU'RE NO HANDSOM PRINCE! YOU'RE JUST A DIRTY, SNEAKY, SLIMY LITTLE _DRUID_!" The exclamation of the princess, who the stranger's appearance had caused him to forget about, caused him to forget about the stranger in turn, his head whipping around to glare at the shrieking beauty from his ignoble heap on the ground.

"HEY! Who do think you're calling LITTLE?" queried an extremely annoyed voice that Starfire knew all too well. It belonged to a certain green-skinned joker, one whose very likeness now lay before her only a few feet from her hiding place. Only a stern warning from Caspar allowed her to control the urge to leap from the brush and wrap the young man in a crushing embrace, she having never been so happy to see his familiar features.

"So this is what you've been up to Beasty? Baiting princesses with the old 'frog prince' routine? I thought you had better luck with the ladies than that! Your insufferable bragging would certainly have it that way," said the stranger mercilessly as he advanced the short distance from the forest's edge to the prostrate changeling and the incensed princess.

"Well Dominic, it's like this: it's been a whole lot harder to get a date ever since SOMEONE _jacked_ my _ride_!"

"That old nag? I figured you'd be happy that I took it off your hands and saved you a trip to the glue factory." The sneer in Dominic's voice was so pronounced that his vicious pride in his own cruelty was a palpable thing in the air around him.

"_That_ _old_ _nag_ was a certifiable CHICK MAGNET! Ever since you walked off with him I've been reduced to begging for smooches with big googly eyes and fish in my boxers."

"HEY! DON'T IGNORE ME! I'M EXTREMLY FURIOUS OVER HERE!" the Princess shrieked, trying to break into the conversation and express her righteous discontent over being deceived and baited out into the backwater without a single handsome prince to show for it. Her efforts were in vain however, the two old foes having nothing but all-absorbing dirty looks for one another. Beast Boy slowly pulled himself to his feet, water dripping from his damp brown tunic as he regained his composure.

"Well you know, I'd love to continue catching up on the good old days, but you _know_ why I'm _really_ here," sneered out Dominic once more, stepping a little closer still so that Starfire could finally catch a glimpse of him. He was a tall blond youth, his long curly hair falling past his shoulders and his strong features molded into a mask of arrogance and deceit. He wore sumptuous red and gold robes of office, a huge heraldic crest of a dragon rearing on its hind legs embroidered on his chest and a vermillion cloak falling over one broad shoulder.

"You can forget it, Dominic. If you think I'm paying one red cent more to that tyrannous whore on the throne, you have another thing coming. That Magic tax has already bled me dry anyway, so I couldn't even pay if I _wanted_ to!"

"HA HA HA!" Dominic belted out, crossing his arms and throwing his head back to accentuate the deep viciousness of his laugh. "Well Beasty, Empress Kitten doesn't take kindly to debtors or tax evaders, especially not from magic using scum like you, so if you can't pay I guess I'll have to cart you off to The Crag to work your debts out of you. I'm sure you'll make a great beast of burden or twenty at the labor camps." The malicious smile on his face was almost manic now, as if he'd waited for his chance to put Beast Boy in shackles and take a whip to his back for ages.

"First of all, my name is _NOT_ 'Beasty!' My FRIENDS call me Beast _Boy_, though _you_ can call me Archdruid Garr. As for dragging me away to The Crag... well... you and what army?" The force of overconfidence was clear in Beast Boy's tone, and Dominic's sneer only grew wider as he heard the green one's latest boast.

"My but I was _hoping_ you would say that! Boys... _get him_!" Suddenly, the other nine men that had been lying in ambush made their presence known by leaping from concealment and surrounding the three figures in the small clearing. The space was downright cramped now, Starfire's view blocked by a man that had leapt over her hiding place to close off that avenue of escape to his target. Though she could see little now through the mass of bodies around her friend, what she did see involved short swords, leather armor, and a number of drawn bows, prompting Caspar to make some offhand comment about using scout infantry in the woods because heavier armor got caught on branches and whatnot. Starfire took his word for it and tensed for her opportunity to leap in and help (it took all her willpower not to just blitz in right away, but Caspar still advised caution) as the soldiers rushed to surround the shape shifter, penning him in at sword point from every side.

"Dominic," Beast Boy began, his voice never faltering for the swords pointed at him, "do you honestly think you can take _me_ in with just nine men?"

Dominic, who had moved around the clearing so he was closer to the princess, responded with, "Oh Beasty, of COURSE not. I'm no fool, and I'd never try to take you in with just nine men. However, I'm absolutely certain I can take you in with nine men... and ONE INNOCENT HOSTAGE!" Hr punctuated his final cry was a grab for the princess, who shrieked in terror and batted at his grip vainly. Wrapping one arm around her supple chest and pinning her arms, he brought his other up to her neck, naked knife pressing against her soft throat.

At the sight of the girl he'd been looking to score a date with only a few moments ago trapped and in mortal danger, Beast Boy's confident façade deflated like a punctured beach ball, his face falling as the gravity of the situation finally dawned on him. His whole body was tense with the urge to transform into something nasty and teach these guys not to mess with him, but he dare not endanger the innocent young woman's life. Glaring daggers at Dominic, he slowly held his hands in the air to show surrender.

"Good boy Beasty, that's what I like to see. Who knows, maybe if you're really cooperative, the boys and I will let you watch us teach this pretty thing what the Empress's men do to little princesses that wander too far from their castles." The threat in Dominic's voice was dripping with vicious lust, causing the girl's eyes to go white all the way around, not even capable of screaming from her intense terror. The soldier's all laughed at her fear, one of them taking out some glowing ropes (_enchanted_, Caspar commented) to tie up Beast Boy with.

Their laughter was cut off abruptly when a thin green beam of light flashed out from some nearby bushes and struck Dominic squarely on his knife hand, causing him to emit a gurgling bellow of agony as he dropped the knife, flung the girl away, and gripped at his ruined right palm. A black burn described a perfect hole in his hand, which he glared through, spotting a green-eyed face as shock overtook his body, fainting dead away at the sight of his own charred flesh and blackened bone. His men and Beast Boy stood frozen together in complete and abject surprise as his body hit the ground.

Their freeze was thawed by the appearance of a screaming goddess of battle zipping out of some nearby underbrush and flying directly toward the clump of soldiers and pointy objects surrounding the young druid. With a piercing battle cry and a blur of movement, Starfire delivered a flying full-roundhouse kick to the nearest soldier, her heel striking him so hard that both he and his compatriot directly next to him were completely swept away, flying into the brush on the far side of the pond with startled cries of pain and the sound of bones breaking. Landing for an instant to regain her balance after the huge blow, Starfire leapt into the air toward the bow wielding soldiers on the other side of the pond just as Beast Boy felt his own combat instincts kick in.

Deciding not to look a gift ally in the mouth, he leaned forward into the space she vacated with her leap into flight and underwent a flash transformation into something to 'take care' of the two soldiers that remained at his back. The two had been so surprised by the appearance of the flying girl only instants ago that they'd each taken a step back, and now just as suddenly found themselves staring at the south side of a north bound, half-ton, jungle green unicorn stallion. Never having had a chance, the two were quickly introduced to one unicorn hoof each, the impact audibly breaking ribs and throwing them back into the trees.

As Beast Boy was instructing the soldiers on the finer points of equine foot anatomy, Starfire was on her way to a point directly over the center of the pool and had consequentially become the subject of attention for five bow-armed men who were no longer surprised. Each having an arrow knocked and drawn already, they trained their bows on the speeding girl as she launched into the air. Before they could get anything like a good bead on her, Starfire had taken measures. As she rose from the ground to the air, she flung a starbolt underhand to each side, delivering two, low energy, low impact, high area projectiles designed to incapacitate without incinerating. Even as these were on the way to smacking the outside two soldiers senseless, she began an aerial summersault and charged another two of similar design, flinging these toward the next two full overhand as she finished her roll. This left one bowman, arrow drawn and aimed, and Starfire at a dead standstill in the air, momentum exhausted by her aerobatics. Rather than attempting a dodge, Starfire went straight to the offensive, launching beams from her eyes even as the last man loosed his arrow at her heart. Sweeping the beam quickly upward from just before his feet to just above his head, Starfire caught the man full on, incinerating the arrow in mid-flight as her gaze rose, blasting the man and grinding him into the wet dirt next to the pond. Pristine control of her power allowed her give him only mild burns in the process, though he wouldn't wake anytime soon.

Calm settled on the clearing then, Starfire slowly relaxing herself as she floated in place over the water, allowing the green glow to bleed from her eyes as the (Tamaranean equivalent of) adrenaline was drained from her system. Caspar's sudden scream into her mind caused her to twirl to the side reflexively, charging a starbolt on the fly as something when whizzing through the air only inches form her gut. Intending to use the momentum from her spin to fling green destruction in the direction of the attack, she caught herself, seeing that green destruction had already arrived. Beast Boy, now in the form of a minor Wyrm (head and spiny scales of dragon, limbless body of snake, 20ft long, 3ft thick) had grabbed up one of the two to first feel Starfire's heel in a tail-wrap embrace, flipped him up in the air, then smacked him like an oversized baseball with a twirling slam from his spiny, gigantic snake's body. The man had another free trip through the air, this time complements of a green lesser dragon, impacting with a thick oak hard enough to shake some leaves off.

Taking a long look around to make sure none of the others felt like another go, Starfire quickly noted that the princess hadn't budged from where Dominic had thrown her, apparently frozen in some kind of post traumatic stress (or so Caspar said, anyway). Sure this time that they were safe, she hovered over to the water's edge and landed gently in the soft soil. Beast Boy, who had snapped back to regular shape virtually the instant the last guy had finished his flight, was still catching his breath a little (remember, big things are hard for him) but stood to full height (about Starfire's chest) and gave her a once over as she walked calmly toward him. Mixed suspicion and admiration competed on his face, but admiration won out rather quickly, and he smiled as she stopped a few steps away from him.

Meanwhile, in Starfire's head, Caspar was doing his best to prevent what was about to happen, trying against all hope to convince Starfire that the young green man she was standing not two feet from was NOT the one she'd know for so long, and had in fact no idea who she was. Why did he even bother? _I_ sure as hell don't know.

In a sudden burst of movement, Starfire went from standing calmly to lunging the short distance between her and Beast Boy. Spontaneously growing a radiant smile, she swept the shorter boy up into her arms and proceeded to hug the life out of him. As the sound of his back cracking and his lungs expelling their contents over her shoulder filled her ears, she shouted a traditional Tamaranean greeting that sounded to Beast Boy something like a combination of baby talk and rocks rattling in a can. As she finally exhausted her joy at seeing him (some three minutes later) and dropped him back to his feet before stepping away, he was able to catch his breath (after another two minutes) and ask, "Do you mind running that by me one more time miss?" between gasps for air.

It was at this point that Starfire realized two things. One, that he really didn't recognize her, vindicating Caspar's point even as it caused her happiness to falter slightly (but not that much really). Two, that he was speaking English, and hadn't understood her greeting at all. This second one caused her to loose a step completely, her face twisting in confusion. He'd been speaking Tamaranean—they'd _all_ been speaking Tamaranean just a minute ago.

"I thought Skye said that everyone here would speak my native language?" she queried to Caspar aloud, still in Tamaranean, making Beast Boy think she was talking to him and trying to explain that he didn't understand her with expansive hand gestures and slow pronunciation of his response. Starfire ignored him and listened intently to Caspar's explanation.

"_No, no, this is a good sign boss. Remember that the progress of your quest here reflects the condition of you recovery. You completed this skirmish and suddenly another language has been absorbed from your mind into this world. That must mean your condition is stabilizing. You're now one step closer to recovery!_"

The news caused Starfire to twirl into the air elatedly in unrestrained glee, starling Beast Boy out of his inept attempts at communication as he fell away from her rocket's path into the air. She floated slowly down again, eyes closed as she reveled in the good news, finally opening them again a few moments later and noticing the prostrate young man at her feet. Shaking her head slightly, she got herself back into English mode in her mind, trying to pick it back up again after an extended immersion in her native tongue.

"I am sorry friend, it has been some time since I spoke in any but my own language. I forgot that not everyone is familiar with it," she said kindly, smiling brightly as she reached down and helped Beast Boy back to his feet. As she pulled him up easily, he got a sense of her grip, and suddenly everything sort of clicked into place. Growing a smile of his own, he brushed off his plain brown tunic before addressing her once more.

"I think I get it now. You're from out west aren't you? One of those warriors from the Kingdom of Tamaran right? It would explain the extreme friendliness, the flying around, the butt kicking, and that interesting language of yours, so I kinda figure that must be it."

"Why... yes!" Starfire improvised nervously, never very good at fabrication of any kind. Caspar was there to whisper crib notes into her ears however, and together they managed a fairly believable tale. "I left home on a spirit quest, an ancient tradition of my homeland. My spirit guide brought me here, where I stumbled upon you and your... acquaintances. I could not bring myself to ignore your plight." She smiled nervously while she waited for him to call out her lie, but to her surprise, he seemed to buy it rather completely.

"So your spirit guide is a snake huh?" he asked, examining the unmistakable mark on her face. She was startled by his insight, wondering how much of the tale Caspar had whispered to her was a lie and how much he'd read from the young man's mind, but gave up that line of thought as profitless before answering.

"Yes, indeed it is. His name is Caspar, and we have been together for only a short time," she said, bringing her right hand up to stroke the mark on her face and rub at the continuation around her neck.

"Well, thanks to you both, you two totally saved my butt back there. I mean, leave it to the Empress's tax collectors to show up at the one time when you've got a princess around to take hostage, right? Oh wait... THE PRINCESS!" he realized his mistake with a shout, turning on his heel and rushing over fallen soldiers to get to where the terrified young woman still sat on the ground. As he grew near, he kneeled down next to her and took her hand in his, forcing her to look at him as he steadied her trembling hand.

"Princess, are you all right? Listen, I can TOTALLY explain the whole frog prince routine. I know I wasn't completely honest about the castle and white horse thing, but I _was_ going to take you out to dinner at a _very_ _nice_ inn I know not far from here, seriously. Before that though, the other reason I needed your help was—"which was as far as he got before she hauled off and smacked him one. The unexpected blow whipped his head around and laid him out on the ground a few feet away, a glowing pink hand mark on his green face.

Springing to her feet, the mud-bedraggled and red-faced girl was no longer quite the vision of beauty she'd been when Starfire had first laid eyes on her. Starfire began to try and speak to her, but Caspar stopped her, and she watched in silence as the girl kicked Beast Boy in ribs once with her pointy sandals, eliciting a yip of pain from the semi-conscious young man. Turning on her heel, she took her earring off her right ear and threw it at the ground, shouting some words that Starfire was unfamiliar with. Promptly, a red rectangle of light grew out of the ground and stopped at roughly door shape and size.

"If I EVER lay eyes on you again, I will PERSONALLY have you thrown in my DUNGEON!" she shrieked, tears in her eyes and dead leaves in her hair. With that she turned once more toward the red gate, striding with as much dignity as possible through it. She didn't emerge from the other side, and the rectangle shrank back into the ground the next moment anyway.

Starfire floated slowly over to the once more prostrate young man, helping him up once more as he recovered from the blow. She wasn't entirely sure what that whole episode had been about, but got the impression that the princess blamed Beast Boy for her ordeal.

"She was... angry with you... yes?" Starfire asked as Beast Boy once again cleaned the layer of forest floor off his now filthy cloths.

"You could say that," he said sarcastically as the sting finally began to fade from his cheek. "Then again, I don't really blame her. If it weren't for me, she'd never have gotten within five hundred feet of _that_," he indicated the prone form of Dominic where it lay still on the very edge of the clearing, referring to him as though he were something one might scrape of his or her boot.

"Yes," Starfire began with a growl, overcome by a wave a nausea and anger at what the scum had implied doing before she'd stopped him. "My people have very specific punishments for men like him," she said vaguely, but with very clear menace.

Incidentally, the punishments involved very sharp things and very soft parts of the male body, not that Starfire knew all that. Her education on the whole subject of the birds and the bees had been insufficient to say the least, complicated as it was by her caretaker's shyness on that subject as well as her lack of friends during that period of her youth (what few young teens that would associate with a princess were scared off by her tyrannous older sister). She'd ended up learning most of what she knew from awkward conversations with Raven following a case involving a serial rapist in Jump City. The threat was one she'd heard her caretaker use many times without ever understanding what it actually implied, but Beast Boy guessed (correctly) and turned a little white at the thought.

"I don't think that'll be necessary, not that he wouldn't deserve it after what he did to poor Moped."

"Mo...ped?" Starfire asked, familiar with Beast Boy's fascination with such a thing but nevertheless confused at his reference to it here.

"Yeah, that was the name of my horse. Honestly, it took me forever to save up and buy him, then the Empress creates the magic tax and suddenly I have to give him up again. Girls love a guy on a white horse you know, even though he was closer to a pony, I guess." The last he said shyly, but with no real regrets. Caspar commented that he doubted the success of the Moped scheme for getting girls, but Starfire ignored him as Beast Boy continued.

"Some of his goons will be awake soon, and they'll help each other to the nearest town. As much as I hate letting scum like these go, they have the backing of the government, so it's not like we can arrest them or something. Sometimes I wish I had the stomach to just off dirtbags like this, but even if I did, the druidic order prohibits killing, so I guess it doesn't really matter."

"True, killing is never the answer," Starfire commented, feeling the conversation grow strained. Beast Boy seemed to have something on his mind, and it weighed heavily on him as he sulked, kicking a stone into the pond and watching the ripples flow over the still shining water.

"Is there... nothing else I can help you with?" Starfire asked hesitantly, no longer content to watch his distress.

"I don't know, it's just that, I wasn't baiting that princess to get a date with her."

Even Starfire caught that one, and stared at him pointedly until he lost his nerve.

"Well, I wasn't _only_ baiting her to get a date with her. Actually, my friend is in some trouble involving magic, and I was hoping that princess would use hers to help him out. I saw her in the woods while I was searching for a wizard and couldn't believe my luck, I mean, princesses are all packed with magic, y'know?"

Starfire didn't know, but was willing to take his word for it. She was about to offer her condolences about his friend when Beast Boy suddenly smacked himself on the forehead.

"DUH! _You've_ got magic, I just watched you toast five soldiers with it! You could help out my friend no problem!"

Starfire suddenly felt trapped. She didn't know the first thing about magic, and she didn't think Caspar knew all that much about it either. On the other hand, she didn't think an explanation of how her powers worked would satisfy her new/old friend. Going with it as best she could, she tried, "I'd be... happy... to help as much as I can. Though I cannot really promise anything, I fear," through clenched teeth, holding a big smile and trying not to sweat too much as Caspar assured her everything was fine. When Beast Boy took this without question too, she sort of let out a breath and continued with, "Please, tell me of your friend's plight so I might know if I can aid him."

"Trust me, it'll be quicker if I just show you. He's not far from here, not since we can both fly. Come on!" and he turned and began to open his arms in preparation to transform into something with wings. Catching himself half way to jumping into the air, he turned around again and walked calmly the few steps back to her, something else entirely clearly on his mind.

"By the way, I don't know _what_ happened to my manners, but I'm Archdruid Garr; you can call me Beast Boy—everyone else does."

"Yes, friend Beast Boy, I am called—(prompt from Caspar telling her to embellish it)—uh... umm... (new prompt from Caspar _providing_ the embellishment) ... I am called Dame Starfire of Tamaran, but please, call me Starfire." Beast Boy once again ignored her falter, seemingly oblivious to her terrible lying.

"You're a knight? That's so cool!" he said enthusiastically as he turned once again, this time leaping into the air and becoming a falcon, flying quickly upward through the gap in the greenery that light still filtered through. Starfire remembered briefly the thought that she was progressing toward recovery, shooting through the same gap and following the green falcon into the open air.

Side of the Main Forest Road

"So, he just stopped here?" asked Starfire, when Beast Boy had finished explaining the situation to her. The two of them stood beside a wide paved road that ran straight as an arrow though the forest, providing a clear path for travelers to make good time through the otherwise almost impassable terrain. To their right was a huge, gunmetal gray, steel-clad carriage, with a covered wagon attached to the back. The wagon was particularly noteworthy because it had no horses, instead sporting a complicated system of pipes and smoke stacks on the back that Starfire assumed was some kind of combustion or steam engine. To their left was their current object of conversation.

Beast Boy's 'friend' had been more or less exactly what Starfire had expected: a low-tech version of _her_ Beast Boy's best friend, Cyborg. Though overjoyed to find yet another analogue to her friends from home, she was more than a little startled by the change in appearance he'd undergone. Gone were the dazzling blue circuitry conduits and hair-fine robotic joints he'd enjoyed in his original body. Instead he was constructed rather crudely, if infinitely sturdily, from plain steel plate and angular metal joints. It was as if he'd been stripped down to the bare robotic skeleton and rebuilt with hunks of medieval plate mail. His head was still encased by metal along the left side, and his eye was still but a slit in the metal, though his current inactive state meant she'd yet to find out if it still gave off that red glow.

"Yeah, that's about the size of it," Beast Boy answered her question, walking up and tapping a few times on the much larger man's metal body, eliciting a dull metallic clang with each blow. "He runs on magic, and when he runs out, he just shuts down like this 'till he gets more. Usually we keep him running on a magical ore you can pick up in any given city, especially since they hit that new lode of it in The Crag. The stuff is called crisym crystal, and the Empress is the main supplier, her mines pulling up millions of tons of it a week to power her golem armies."

"I am sorry... golem armies?" Starfire queried, somewhat embarrassed by her own ignorance of current events here. It was shaping up to be a repeat performance of her first three months on Earth.

"Wow, stupid me," Beast Boy hit himself on the head again before apologizing to her, "I keep forgetting your not from around here. Come on, let's get the tin man here running again, he can explain this strange new world better than I ever could."

With that Beast Boy went over to the carriage and pulled a folding stool out from where it was attached to the bottom. Setting it up right behind Cyborg's heavy metal body, he used it to close the foot and a half distance between him and a well concealed latch on Cyborg's back. When he cracked the hatch, it vented a cloud of red gas that caused him to gag and wave at the air to drive it away, until finally he could see through the crimson miasma. Curious beyond her ability to contain herself, Starfire flew up behind Beast Boy and peered into the gaping hole in her mechanical friend's back.

"The crisym goes in here," Beast Boy stated the obvious, indicating the deep metal pit before him. "We'd have had enough, and we wouldn't have this problem now, only SOMEONE cheaped out at the last town! I TOLD him we should get more than five crowns worth, but NOOO. He's been pinching every shilling since the Empress started the magic tax—he says he's saving up for the war fund or something like that."

"Umm..." Starfire reluctantly began to venture another question, but Beast Boy waved her silent.

"Like I said, he'll explain things better than I can, so let's just get him started."

"Very well. What do you wish me to do?"

"Simple. All Cyborg here really needs is a jumpstart of raw energy to tide him over to the next town a few miles from here. He can run on any kind of magic, so just go ahead and shoot some in there, we'll slam the hatch shut, and he should start up just like that." It certainly sounded simple to Starfire, but she wasn't entirely sure Beast Boy knew what he was talking about, and, much to her continuing doubt, neither was Caspar.

"I do not know if that is such a good idea," began Starfire then, putting a finger to her chin and looking up in uncertainty. "My power is highly destructive... and I have no idea how much he may require. I do not wish to damage him internally with my 'help.'"

"Ah don't worry about old Cy, he's built to last. Just go ahead and shoot a goodly blast of that starfire in here and I'll take care of the rest. I'm _sure_ he'll thank us afterward!" The confidence in Beast Boy's tone was something Starfire had learned to be wary of, indicating as it often did that he really didn't know what was going to happen and was bluffing his way through the situation. Then again, this Beast Boy had so far proven to be far more 'cool' than the one she knew, showing much more competence, if not a whole lot more maturity, than her own familiar friend. She went ahead and used this fact to base her decision to go with his plan. Unfortunately for Beast Boy himself, some things never change.

Nodding her agreement to him, she flew a little higher and backed up, putting a little distance between her and the roughly 3/4 ft cylinder she was about to try and stuff a starbolt down. Beast Boy changed into a monkey, climbed limberly up to the top of his big friend's shoulders, then changed back. Placing one hand on either side of the double hatch that covered the reactor, he poised himself to slam it shut and trap the green energy inside.

Balancing herself ramrod-straight in the air, Starfire placed her left fist in her right palm, elbows extended outward to form sort of a cross shape with her body. Taking one last look at the target, she closed her eyes, turning slowly ninety degrees to her right in the process, so that her left elbow pointed toward Beast Boy and Cyborg. After a moment of concentration, during which she struggled to choose just the right amount of power for the size of the hole she was aiming at, she opened her eyes again, letting their new green glow shine brightly as she turned her head to stare at the target. As ready as she'd ever be, she executed her attack in a single fluid movement.

Drawing back her right hand, she allowed the power she'd already formed in her mind to flow into her palm even as she brought her arm through an over-shoulder arc that would make a professional pitcher shed a tear of joy. Twisting in midair, she used the movement of her body through a simple contortion to accentuate the momentum of her throw, coming out of the maneuver with her legs pointed slightly behind her and her arm extended fully forward. Her shout of "KIYAHH!" perfectly coincided with the climax of her movement, the green teardrop-shaped spheroid of melting energy ejecting from her hand and bee-lining for Cyborg's reactor with pinpoint accuracy.

Her blast struck his power core with a dull clang and a backlash of green lightning that vented freely from the now-glowing hole until Beast Boy slammed the hatch shut and latched it closed. For a moment, nothing happened, and both watched with baited breath for some reaction from Cyborg. Sudden enough to startle both of them, his whole body began to hum softly, and after their initial jumps of surprise, each smiled in satisfaction.

"SWEET! I knew this would work, I KNEW IT! Who's the man?" Beast Boy asked himself in congratulations, doing a little dance from where he sat on Cyborg's shoulders. The calm humming slowly rose to a higher pitch, Cyborg's body vibrating like an oversized electric razor in the process. Starfire, assuming this was a normal part of the startup process, smiled and giggled charmingly as she watched Beast Boy's continuing antics.

Beast Boy, it turns out, had been so absorbed by his own victory that he hadn't noticed the vibrating going on right beneath his butt, and when he did take notice, his face fell and panic caused his eyes to nearly pop out of his head. He looked down, body otherwise frozen by heart-stopping terror, and he managed to whimper slightly before his plan's ultimate backfire lit him up like green neon lamp.

The power overload from using raw fusion energy in an archaic magic conversion reactor was spectacular, taking the form of a full-body green lightning bath running through Cyborg's metal frame like dancing streamers of iridescent burning light. The lightning hardly ignored Beast Boy, who found himself the subject of extreme pain as he too was riddled with hot needles of power. Jerking wildly about on his perch and screaming as his every nerve was rocked with heat, he looked... well... a lot like someone being electrocuted. The force of the energy running through him finally overcame his 'electrical' connection to his bud's metal body though, and he was blown off the metal man like a smoking green bottle rocket, flying several feet into the air before landing in a crumpled heap at the foot a nearby tree.

Starfire had also been frozen with shock, her own eyes wide as she stared at her small green friend's writhing form. His explosive separation from the electrical storm that was Cyborg shook her from her shock at last, and taking a wide route through the road proper to avoid the leaping electricity around Cyborg, she made her way to the charred changeling. Upon closer examination, he wasn't that badly hurt, merely given a light toasting and dazed out his senses, and she helped him to his feet after she'd determined that he would survive. She talked to him to try and get him back into his right mind then, even as Cyborg continued to cook in brilliant green auroras.

"Friend Beast Boy! I'm so glad you are all right," she said to him, patting some of the char out of his now truly tattered tunic. "It would seem as though I... overdid it." He responded with some woozy mumblings about pretty women and wanting kisses, but Caspar assured Starfire that he was not asking _her_ for anything.

It was at about this point that Cyborg's systems finished assimilating Starfire's power, the green lightning dying down as he began to activate properly. Besides a rising cloud of grey smoke that wafted out of his joints, he seemed undamaged in any way Starfire was able to see from where she stood by Beast Boy. In fact, he looked really good, as if the green lightning had fried off the dull patina on his armor and left him looking shiny and new. As she continued to reassess her original disdain for his crude look, he began to truly start up, and she realized how deeply wrong she'd been.

As energy reached his quiet body, the blue light that she'd missed in his arms and legs presented itself, intricate blue lines tracing themselves all over his arms, legs, head, and shoulders as he powered up. The lines seemed to draw themselves right onto his body as he lit with the glow of his own power source, and suddenly Starfire realized that the lines had actually been etched into his metal plating, remaining invisible until he received power. As the final lines appeared in the metal plate in his skull, the light that was the sensor array replacing his left eye flickered into life, glaring out its mechanical red glow.

"Ohhh..." began Cyborg, one huge hand rising slowly to his metal-plated cranium, "my head... feels... GREAT!" and suddenly he split a huge smile and closed his eyes as he went into a series of stretches that would test all his joints. Some of them had squeaking kinks, but he moaned in pleasure as he worked these out, doing some test punches from a classic boxer's footwork of hopping about that made the ground shake under Starfire's feet and caused big cracks to appear in the cut-stone pavement. Starfire was just a little too bemused by his apparent health to speak up herself, and Beast Boy wasn't in much of a state to address anyone just yet. When he finished waking up, he began to search around for someone he knew should have been there.

"B.B., where are you homeboy? I don't know what kind of crisym you switched me to, but damn man, we need to get some more of this... stuff?" His hesitation was caused by the sight of Beast Boy and a strange young woman when he finally turned their direction. Walking up to them with a seriously perturbed look on his face, he asked simply, "Miss, would you care to explain why my green friend there looks like he got in a fight with a thunderstorm and lost?" Starfire broke out in a slight sweat when she realized that he must suspect her of something, and her answer reflected her nervousness at the force of the huge man's distrust.

"Uh... It was an accident. There was a clearing... and the Empresses tax collectors... and a big fight... and a princess—"

"Did you just say princess?" Cyborg caught out the one word that always stuck out with Beast Boy and trouble.

"Yes—"she was cut off again before she could explain further, this time by an expansive groan and gesture of hopelessness from Cyborg. The groan said something like "how does he manage to get us into these situations?" even as he resigned himself with the huge shrug.

"Alright, I know just from that that this'll be one heck of a story, so let's take care of the little guy first."

Indescribably relieved to no longer be the subject of Cyborg's intimidating glare, Starfire helped him get Beast Boy into the passenger area of the horseless carriage. At his beckoning, she sat up on top next him as he began manipulating the simple levers and pedals that drove the device. When he had gotten it started, it vented a single, long, whistling blast of steam from the huge pipes sticking on the back and began to sidle forward slowly. It picked up speed quickly, and soon they were bouncing down the road at a magnificent clip, the rubber-coated, metal-reinforced, wooden wheels making a fantastic racket as the uneven stones raced beneath them.

"Alright, go ahead an lay it on me," he said, giving a quick glace at the mysterious beauty Beast Boy had once again managed to cross paths with. That little guy had all the luck.

On the Main Forest Road

Starfire told her tale slowly as they zipped down the wide road, pausing often to catch her breath when the jarring bumps knocked the air from her lungs. As she detailed meeting Beast Boy and the encounter at the clearing, the landscape moved by at a harrowing pace (45mph seems REALLY fast when you're on an open vehicle). Every so often, Cyborg would spot someone ahead of them, turning a crank on the wooden paneling between his driver seat and her passenger seat that would in turn make a hammer strike a huge bell attached to the front of the carriage below the driver's perch. People they buzzed by tended to gape and stare for the few seconds it took them to fade into the distance behind them, indicating to Starfire that their mode of transportation wasn't exactly a commonplace sight. When she'd finally finished describing the process of restarting him, punctuated by his bursts of laughter at the thought of Beast Boy getting toasted, he sat in consideration of her words for some time, the only sound that of wood jarring along stone.

"Y'know," he began at last, speaking detachedly as he stared off into the distance for people that might get in the way, "Normally, I wouldn't trust you even a little bit... and, I'd probably pitch you off my carriage out of principle and wait for B.B. to come to to find out if I was justified or not."

Starfire felt her heart leap into her mouth at the thought of having any kind of serious fight with her friend, but her protest died in her throat when he held up his hand to forestall her interruption. Apparently he had expected her to profess her innocence and beg his patience, and didn't want her to waste her breath.

"_Normally_, that's what I'd do, but there's something about you... something familiar. You just seem like someone who wouldn't lie, and I respect that—it's pretty rare after all. So here's what's up: we'll wait to hear B.B.'s side of the story together, and after that, _if_ he confirms it, then we'll talk more."

"You are a very suspicious man." Starfire commented, not the slightest hint of accusation or admonition in her tone. The statement had been made as only a statement, and thus, no matter how much it grated on Cyborg, he couldn't really bring himself to get angry at her.

"Well, I've got good reason. There're about a dozen extremely powerful nobles and knights—plus all their armies—that would just _looove _to get their greasy paws on me and my bud back there."

"You mean like Dominic?"

"Nah, that scum-sucker was most likely just doing his job. Human trash like him come up so far down the chain of command that I doubt he's even heard the orders to arrest us on sight yet. If he had, he'd have brought more men to get B.B."

Accepting this, Starfire once more fell into silence. She had a stinging curiosity to know _why_ the fantasy versions of her friends were wanted by the government rather than acting a crime fighting heroes, but she dared not ask lest she aggravate Cyborg into making good on his earlier threat. Caspar, however, would have none of it, and proceeded to prod at her incessantly to voice her question, apparently having a curiosity of his own to satisfy. Finally, she couldn't take it anymore, and asked her question, more to get Caspar off her back than to satisfy her own earlier curiosity.

"Cyborg, why is it that these people are after you? Have you... done something wrong?" she cringed slightly when she was finished, ready for any outburst he might make.

"Hmmm." Cyborg glared at her out of the corner of his human eye, keeping always aware of those ahead of him. "For no particularly good reason, I feel like answering that one. Okay, you ask if we've done something wrong. Well, by the standards of the people we oppose, we've committed unforgivable crimes, the kind of thing they execute you for. By the standards of sane and just people, we're heroes."

"Truly?" she egged him on, wanting to believe that even here her friends were champions of the people.

"Let's just say that the current rulers _aren't_ what you'd call sane _or_ just. Empress Kitten is an insufferable, self-indulgent, greedy little brat with more power than sense by a hell of a large margin. No one can prove it, _of course_, but it's said that she assassinated her uncle to become ruler. The engineer of that whole plot, and the true power behind the throne, is a psychopathic sadist by the name of Duke Slade, Lord of the Northern Marches. That warmongering scumbag became Prime Minister out of the deal, and immediately began a war of aggression with the Kingdom of Jump's closest neighbor, the Kingdom of Gotham." Suddenly, Cyborg found himself telling her the whole story of the last three years, even though he'd promised himself he wouldn't trust her until Beast Boy woke up and confirmed her story. Something about her made him trust her intrinsically, despite the various powerful figures out to see him disassembled.

"The war raged for two and half years, Jump's newly built force of golem warriors, stone automatons that follow Duke Slade's orders, having an upper hand at first. The ruler of Gotham changed that when he fielded his own special force, the Dark Knights. King Batman led them himself, and his chosen air, Prince Robin (Starfire's heart skips a beat), was their captain. Using daring nighttime raids and unparalleled skill, they beat back Slade's forces mercilessly, not even Slade's own chosen Captains able to stand against them. Each of them fell: Masonstone (no cinderblocks here folks) the living siege engine, Sir Mammoth the Strong, Mistress Jinx the Black Witch, and... oh... who was that last one? Oh yeah, Sir Gizmo the _short_, _foul_-_mouthed_ and _obnoxious_."

"Umm..."

"Yeah, I did make up that last one myself, because I HATE that guy. We studied together in the Jump Royal Engineering Academy, and we didn't like each other then. When the war broke out, he was scouted by Slade and I fled the country, not wanting anything to do with a war like that. When I got to Gotham, I realized that my abilities were going to waste, so I joined the Dark Knights hoping I could help depose Slade and Kitten and move back to my home in Jump."

"How did everything 'turn out'?" she ventured, trying another idiom she'd been practicing of late.

"Well, while in the Dark Knights, I met Prince Robin and Beast Boy, and the three of us became buds. Beast Boy's situation was similar to mine, he left his druidic circle in Jump Forest to fight against Slade, even though all his fellow druids opposed it. They're not supposed to be violent y'know, even though they do train in combat to protect their forests. Anyway, with King Batman and Prince Robin to lead us, we drove back Slade and his golems, no problem. It looked like we would win and force Jump to surrender when Slade pulled his fast one. Enlisting the aid of a nutcase criminal within Gotham—some crackpot by the name of Joker, dangerous though—he managed to strike against King Batman himself, wounding him and damaging our morale big time. We fell back when we should have advanced, and the next thing you know it was a stalemate."

"Prince Robin... was he unharmed?" she asked, fear jumping into her spine as she thought of having lost the Robin of this world as well.

"He was fine... but why'd you wanna know? Never mind. To our great surprise, Slade himself came forward with a peace offering, something that should have aroused our suspicion right away. Robin sure as heck didn't trust him, but King Batman's ministers snapped up the chance to end the war without loosing any land right away, ignoring the danger of dealing with men like Slade. The exact wording of the treaty was sort of an armistice, just and end to conflict, no provisions made for anything. The only stipulation was that the two countries be bound by marriage to cement the deal. So, having little choice as long as King Batman's ministers ran the country while the big guy was down for the count, Robin agreed to the arranged marriage.

Starfire's gasp expressed the spectacular way her heart dropped quite perfectly, her hands flashing up to cover her mouth as her body stiffened in horror. "He... had to marry... _KITTEN_?"

"HA! She wishes! No, traditions older than most of these trees clearly stipulate that if Kitten married Robin she'd have to give up her throne to him. As much as she'd love to have Robin as her own, she loves her power far more, so they had to track down the current heir apparent to the throne of Jump. Royalty has been pretty scarce there, especially since Kitten had all her closest relatives killed or otherwise removed from the line up to secure her power base. So, the heralds checked the records for days looking for a suitable bargaining chip to secure the peace agreement, finally coming up with a third cousin of a third cousin or some such, a princess from out west somewhere. Hey, you said you're from out that way, maybe you've heard of her? Her name was... uh... Kiriand'r—or some such foreign thing or other."

Starfire felt sick. A wave of nausea threatened to sweep over her, followed quickly by a compulsive urge to either scream or faint. The knowledge that what Blackfire had been talking about, all that rambling about marriages and wars and Starfire's intrinsic role in it all, that it had all been true, and that she was supposed to MARRY ROBIN, hit her like a speeding horseless carriage. Caspar took that moment to exercise his discretionary emergency authority, putting a plug on her reaction and allowing her to take the news without the slightest quirk of her features.

"I do know her..." she began slowly, "and I heard she never made it to the wedding."

"Yeah, that turned out to be the catch in Slade's deal. Apparently, they'd found a new mother lode of crisym crystal in a part of the Mountains of Agony known as The Crag. The peace treaty was to give them enough time to tap it and rebuild their army before striking again. No one knows for sure, but it's suspected that when they struck the deal that gained them Tamaran's princess, they also struck a deal to have her 'taken care of' on the trip over here. Anyway, it didn't stop there. Using the pre-wedding celebrations in Jump as bait, they lured Robin into a trap and captured him not two weeks ago."

"No..." Starfire felt her whole body go numb, the knowledge that her loved one and, apparently, fiancée had been captured by a vicious enemy settling like bad pasta in her gut.

"The worst part is, because of the months of delay between the armistice and the marriage, the Gotham army, including me and B.B., had already dispersed back to our homes. It was good to be back in Jump... for about the first _month_ anyway. After that, Empress Kitten instituted the magic tax. We thought it was just some annoying extra provision to cover the cost of the war debt at first, so we put up with it. Then it got worse, and people who couldn't pay started disappearing. About two months back, B.B. and I decided to stop paying it, and we were on our way out of the country when one of Robin's messengers caught up with us. When we found out about his capture and Slade's plot, we turned my wheels around on the spot and started back toward Jump Palace, where we figure he's being held. Using our secret messengers, Beast Boy, Me, and one other of the old Dark Knights living in Jump formed a plan to rescue him. That's where we were headed when I ran out of power, and that's why were hauling _that_ (he nods back toward the cart behind the carriage)."

"You must allow me to help you rescue Robin." Starfire said without preamble the very instant Cyborg had finished talking.

"Whoa little lady, this is _our_ fight, not yours. You seem nice, so I'll give you a ride to the next town, but after that, we're going our separate ways."

"No, you do not understand, I MUST help you save Robin." The determination in Starfire's voice belied her gentle nature, sounding like hot steel and burning forge fire under her words.

"You're right; I _don't_ understand why you're so insistent about some guy you've never met from a country you claim you've never been to before." Suspicion was creeping back into Cyborg's voice, his eyes narrowing as he wondered if it had been such a good idea to spill his guts to this interesting young woman.

"Please friend Cyborg... calm yourself. I can explain all," she said, looking down as she brought her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs where she sat on the deep seat. Caspar began detailing further lies out of habit, but Starfire ignored him, instead gathering the courage to come clean with this version of her friend and trust that he was as understanding here as he was in her world. "You see," she continued, "I _am_ Princess Kiriand'r, former heir of Tamaran... and betrothed of Prince Robin of Gotham."

Cyborg did a double take to say the least. Nearly choking on his tongue with the force of his surprise, he took his bulging eye off the road for one second too long, finally catching himself and swerving to avoid a trader's wagon at the last instant by going up on two wheels and edging bye, very nearly loosing the trailer behind them in the process. Carefully regaining control of the speeding vehicle once all the wheels were back on the ground, he pulled on the brake lever and cut the power, allowing the vehicle to slow to a stop on the side of the road. Both were breathing heavily, recovering from the near-miss shock, but Cyborg nonetheless found the breath to voice his staggering surprise.

"YOU'RE THE PRINCESS?" he managed, succinctly expressing the question that had successfully hijacked his brain.

"Please do not be upset," Starfire begged, slumping slightly where she sat as she became fearful of loosing his trust. "I escaped from my captor with aid from a... friend. He gave me my spirit guide and advised me to find my quest if I wished for true freedom. Now I fear that Prince Robin has been captured because of me, and I cannot simply sit aside and not help rescue him."

"So...?"

"I don't know if I want to marry him or not, but I must at least help rescue him. It is my duty."

Cyborg sighed deeply, knowing in his magically-hybridized heart that she was telling nothing but the plain truth. Making a snap decision that he was somehow sure he would live to regret, he said simply, "Alright princess, you can come along."

"Truly?" Starfire snapped back, head rising out of her folded legs with an expression of such pure relief and joy that it would melt the heart of any sane man, Cyborg not excluded. "Thank you SO much friend Cyborg, you will not regret this decision!" Caspar made some forceful suggestions, annoyed that she'd spilled the beans but otherwise just trying to keep things safe, so Starfire went ahead and followed his advice, finding it to be sound anyway. "If I might make one request however?"

"Now what?" Cyborg was less annoyed than he was concerned about having a princess along for the quest, but his tone wasn't so clear, and Starfire had to gather courage again to finish her request.

"It is just that, I do not wish to be treated as something frail and easily breakable while traveling with you and your friends. I am a warrior in my own right, and I desire no special treatment. Because of this, it would mean much to me if you would not tell the others my true identity."

"You realize what you're askin' me?"

"Yes, and I would not ask it if I did not truly believe it would make things easier for everyone."

"Heh, Robin often said pretty well the same thing when people would try and stop him from doing dangerous stuff. Hmm... okay, we'll keep this between just the two of us."

Starfire expressed her enormous gratitude with a hug around the metal man's cold steel chest. It wasn't one of her crushing friendship hugs, but Cyborg could still feel a strain on his joints as her strength shined through, and decided that maybe she wouldn't be a burden after all.

The Kodak moment was broken by the sound of tortured wailing from the passenger cabin containing Beast Boy, and both of them turned with a start to look back, even though there was no way to see in through the metal-plated roof. Cyborg's concern melted into amusement quickly however, as he immediately realized what must have happened. When Starfire gave him a confused look at his uncontrollable laughter, he slowly stopped himself before answering.

"I've got a big mirror on one of the wall panels down there. Beast Boy musta come to and gotten a look at what his dew looks like after that electricity bath."

They shared the laughter this time.

The Meandering Bog, that night

"Mannn, I HATE this swamp!" complained Beast Boy, adjusting his hair again as he sat between Cyborg and Starfire on the roof of the coach, just behind the actual driver's perch. "Are you sure there isn't any other way?"

"For the millionth time man, we HAVE to go through the swamp, every other road is patrolled by Slade's forces." Cyborg was more than a little tired of Beast Boy's bellyaching, having heard no end of it since he'd first told him of the circuitous route they were taking to Jump Palace and the tower Robin was being held in. The whole way here it had been nothing but "the swamp makes my fur frizzy," or "the swamp smells bad," and the ever classic, "are you SURE there's no other way?"

"_Honestly_ B.B. you're a _DRUID_! Aren't you supposed to be, I don't know, a little more _in_ _touch_ with nature?"

"Hey, forests: yes, mountains: yes, jungles: oh yes, any water at all: I'm there—THAT swamp? HELL NO! It's a completely lifeless hole and it gives me the creeps, nine out of ten druids agree it would be better wiped off the map!"

"Friends, please stop arguing," cut in Starfire as it looked like Cyborg and Beast Boy were about to have a serious slap fight on the moving coach. They were in a barren clearing currently heading toward the edge of the swamp, which lay some distance away ahead of them. Cyborg was somehow able to argue with Beast Boy and keep the coach on the roughly hewn path they were riding along, although only at a much lower speed.

"This is _such_ a bad idea. That swamp is _cursed_, no one who goes in there on the west road _ever_ comes out again! I mean, why do you think Slade doesn't bother guarding it?"

"Would you just stuff it man? We're going through and that's FINAL! I've taken the north road myself, and it was fine. The west road can't be as bad as everyone says, that's all just a crock of half-baked legends used to get people to take the toll road along the northern path. I say we can definitely go in there and survive the experience!"

"I'm telling you man, if we go into that forest, we're _done_ for. Some of the other druids came to check this place out, just a routine trip to see if it was worth starting a circle here, y'know? The ones that scouted the north came back with stories of a creepy place devoid of any animals or plants, just barren dead things, not even really rotting. The ones that went to the west side were _never_ heard from again."

"Come on, maybe they just... got lost or something?" Cyborg actually sounded kind of nervous now, almost as though he was trying to convince himself.

"Druids? Get _lost_? In _nature_? You're kidding, right?" Beast Boy could smell victory, but it was not to be, the carriage barreling down the last open stretch of road and into the inky black shadows of the gnarled dead trees that overshadowed the road and blocked out the last vestiges of moonlight. Cyborg pulled another lever, opening a pair of hatches that covered two torches with mirrors around them set into the front of the carriage. At the same time, he shrugged his left shoulder, opening a panel Starfire hadn't noticed before. Snapping his fingers in front of it, he created a spark, lighting a small oil lamp with a similar mirror set up as the torches on the front of the carriage. Three beams of light struck out then, illuminating the endless black pit before them with lonely streamers of warmth. As the moonlit clearing disappeared around a bend in the road behind them, Beast Boy began muttering quiet prayers to the gods of nature, praying desperately as darkness closed around them on all sides. Starfire too felt a sense of foreboding that she couldn't deny, and hoped deeply that Cyborg's gambit was successful. Finally, Caspar added his own fear to the mix, commenting on a sense of impending danger that was no mere worry...

Preview: Cool, up next, we'll see that, oh lord almighty NOOOOO! ... Beast Boy (AHHH!) was right! Will the wonders never cease? In any case, neat battle scene (or two) and some more fantasy junk next chapter. Actually, I may be able to end this story arc next chapter too! In any case, look for the entrance of fantasy Raven and a little bit of something I've been planning since, like, chapter 7 and 8. Stay tuned for: The Journey Part-III.

DON'T FORGET TO REVIEW! (Please?)


	12. The Journey Part 3

Intro: Ah, hello again after a sadly long absence. Things around school and the dorm proved most distracting these past weeks, so it is only now that I update with the exciting conclusion to this story arc. Yes, it is its own story arc well and truly now, it just happens to take place halfway through another story arc. Anyway, it has all the combat I promised, plus so very much more, so I hope it was worth the wait for anyone who actually reads this (recent reviews, or lack thereof, have left me doubting on whether there are such people). Sit tight for the long haul, you won't want to miss the end of this one, even though I did kind of blow my own length limitations out of the water (I just couldn't think of a good place to split it for a two-chapter update).

Chapter 12: The Journey Part-III

Meandering Bog Entrance, fifteen minutes after they go in

One gazing into the pitch black of the nighttime swamp from the arch-like point where the bog ended and the wasteland before it began would have noticed some strange happenings around this time. Most likely, that person would first see a few discreet points of light, some moving, others just pointing straight toward him or her. The lights would vary in color, some green, some bright blue, others the plain yellow of firelight. As the moments passed, the lights would grow closer, and sound would gradually accompany the lights. The buzzing of high energy projectiles would be distinct among the bass of enormous explosions and the constant rattling of some kind of mechanical engine working overtime, always growing louder as the lights grew brighter and more distinct. Everything would be underscored by a terrifying wailing sound, as if thousands of disembodied voices were crying out in a symphony of pain and anger. Someone with the guts to stick around to this late point would be able to make out figures struggling on top of a mechanical carriage, beset by ethereal forms of a distinctly terrifying nature. This hypothetical observer would have done well to get the fuck out of the way at this point, because there wasn't anything that could stop the breakneck momentum of Cyborg's autocarriage now.

Bursting from the swamp's edge like a shot, the carriage fairly hopped over the rough ground as a furious struggle raged on the roof. Cyborg and Starfire stood back to back, surround on all sides by horrifying apparitions and spawn of hell. Flaming skulls circled and gibbered as huge zombie bats and vultures harried the already battered pair. Floating ghosts with frozen, dead faces tried to suck out their souls and posses their bodies, even as animate skeletons clung to the sides of the carriage and tried to claw at their legs or pull them from their defensive position. Beast Boy was poised on the very edge of the driver's seat, legs barely able to reach the steering pedals, gripping desperately at the throttle lever as he vainly attempted to open it further, eyes wide with terror.

The life and death struggle on the back of the carriage was winding down, the incredible fury of the undead creatures lessening now that they could no longer receive endless reinforcements from the fetid waters and brittle trees of the cursed bog behind them. "WIDE BEAMS" shouted Cyborg, whose hand was now a magic cannon that bore a striking resemblance to his weapon in the real world. Responding to his plan, Starfire prepared for yet another effort, tired, but far from out of destructive energy to rain on these freakish foes. At the same time then, Starfire opened up with one wide beam from each of her hands and Cyborg added one of his own from his cannon arm, the two of them quickly sweeping the air clean of ghostly assailants like one might wipe spots of filth from a windshield with a squeegee. As vaporized zombie flesh and bits of charred skull rained down on them, a jolting bump threw them from their feet, leaving each of them in a separate heap on the carriage roof.

Before Starfire could take off from her prone position and resume the battle from the now clear air, a bony hand reached out from the edge of the carriage and gripped onto her leg. Screaming reflexively, her eyes darted down to see the empty eye sockets of a bare skeleton staring at her from the back side of the speeding vehicle. A supernatural strength jerked at her leg, causing a burning pain to arc down her limb as the claw-like bones of the fingers dug into her flesh and left shallow red cuts between the leather straps that wrapped up her legs. The jerk brought her closer, pulling the skeleton's bleached white form up into view, giving her a great big target to exact her revenge on. After her grimace of pain at the new cuts in her leg, her eyes opened to reveal twin pits of green fire that would not be contained, green lasers leaping out to sweep over the bony form before her. The brittle animate bones disintegrated easily, leaving only a bone arm clinging to her leg and a set of skeletal legs that clattered off the back of the carriage and were crushed by the wheels of the wagon that still followed behind them. She was given no time to rest, a scream of frustration from Cyborg prompting her to look back at him.

Somehow, four fleshless forms had mustered enough force to hold the immensely strong metal man down to the top of the carriage, one at each of his arms and legs. As she watched, the one holding his right arm got its head blown off in a single iridescent flash of blue. As he tried to train the cannon on another of his assailants, he found that it was still pinned, the skeleton's headless body clinging as ferociously as ever. The Skeleton holding his left arm then climbed further up onto the carriage, reaching for Cyborg's face with the intent to kill, most likely going for a stab into the brain through his one good eye.

A hastily thrown starbolt from the back of the carriage struck the skeleton in its reaching arm close to the body, vaporizing the arm, head, and part of the chest before proceeding on to fry off a u-shaped burn in the carriage's front edge right next to Cyborg's ear and zip forward to singe a few hairs off Beast Boy's only recently fixed dew. Ignoring the skeletons for a moment, both guys turned bulging eyes accusatorily toward Starfire, who had the presence of mind to blush deeply at her mistake. All joking aside then, Cyborg used the broken remains of the skeleton that had gone for his face like a club to sweep the skeleton on his cannon arm away, freeing both hands and allowing him to sit up. At the same instant then, he trained his cannon at the head and shoulders of the bone heap on his left leg and Starfire got a bead on the one to the right, a set of energy blasts disintegrating the upper bodies of the final two creatures simultaneously.

Getting to his feet, Cyborg ordered Beast Boy to pull the breaks. The next moment, Starfire took off to keep her balance as Cyborg was thrown from his feet once more, this time landing upside down on the passenger side of the driver's perch. Having a few choice words with the shorter man, who honestly hadn't _known_ that pulling the break all the way up immediately would do that, Cyborg became engrossed in making sure the untested driver hadn't damaged the controls, probably as a way of blowing off the post traumatic stress they were all suffering right then.

Starfire landed once more on the roof of the carriage, using a melting green touch of green fusion-fire surrounding her hands to fry the skeleton's ironclad bony grip off her leg. The slaged bone fell to the carriage's roof as she calmed herself, examining the cuts in her leg to make sure they weren't too bad and generally taking stock after the battle. She had just about finished when the situation changed once more.

"_Nooonnnne escape the cuuurrrssse_," wailed a deathly voice, sounding as if the wind itself were moaning out words into the night air. Leaping back up onto the roof, Cyborg stared out into the blackness in the direction of the swamp, a look of fury twisting his visage into a frightening mask. His red eye flared, even here possessing enhanced vision over normal eyesight. Thus he wasn't at all surprised when a lithe figure leapt out of the bleak shadows beneath the wagon trailer, catching the speeding figure with a classic uppercut as it flung itself toward him. The sickening sound of impact was followed by the muscular beastly form flying into the air, twisting about in the moonlight before falling back toward the carriage. With a straight right punch, Cyborg dug the barrel of his magic gun deep into the demonic figure's gut, the furry, horned creature twitching in agony as it was held in the air on the end of the blaster.

"Boo—yah," said Cyborg quietly, emphasizing the syllables one at a time for effect. After a short pause where the demon gave him a pathetic pleading look, Cyborg pulled the trigger, blasting the creature off into the night at high speed, the beam carrying it far out of sight before Cyborg let it die.

"HAH! No one escapes, huh? If that's the best you can do, then I guess there's a first time for everything!" shouted Beast Boy, following up with some mildly offensive hand gestures and annoying faces toward the swamp behind them. The unnatural quiet of the night eventually cowed him into silence, a strange gravity hanging over the area as they stood in silence, hoping against hope that they were safe at last. No such luck, I'm afraid.

A few clouds that had been partially blocking the moon edged out of the way, casting the area in a light bright enough to illuminate the swamp behind them. As they stared in that direction, each felt goose bumps rise on their flesh and the hair stand to attention on their necks. Without warning, an inhuman shrieking filled the air, sending shocks up and down their spines and causing each of them to flinch back at the terrifying sound. As they each looked on in horror, the swamp trees took on an unearthly glow in the moonlight, gathering some kind of cursed energy for some unknown end.

"I begin to think that perhaps _taunting_ the swamp of hurting and ghosts was not the best of plans," commented Starfire, wringing her hands along her red braid in fear as she watched the glowing energy collect in three swirling nexuses above the trees. Beast Boy managed a nervous giggle at her comment before the developing situation squished everything but terror from his mind.

Emerging from the three mounds of collecting power were what could only be described as enormous body parts. A skull easily as big as their whole carriage came first, empty sockets staring up at the sky, two huge bone horns projecting from just above each eye socket showing it to be a demonic apparition as well. To either side, bony hands that were more like enormous talons sprouted out of the other two mounds of power, each as large as the skull itself. When all three had finished manifesting, the two talons reached out of the swamp in two quick flashes of growth, the skull following more sedately as it turned its blank gaze at the three of them. The parts were connected by a formless body of smoky shadow, distinguishable only as a deeper dark than the sky against the bright moonlight.

"Any chance of us getting out of here?" asked Beast Boy, in a voice made small by cowering.

"No way man, not after the number you did on the engine with that emergency braking. Thanks to you, we aren't going anywhere." Cyborg's gaze stood frozen on the ghostly monster before him as he spoke, his voice also colored by fear.

"Well hey, we wouldn't even _BE_ here now if you'd just listened to me in the first place!" Beast Boy vented a slight sound of satisfaction at being right for once, but it was a rather feeble attempt at breaking the grip of fear on his chest that failed miserably.

"It's a _little_ _late_ for 'I Told You So' now man." Any further comments from Cyborg were cut off by the enormous demon before them speaking out in the same ghostly voice of before.

"_Nooonnnne escape the cuuurrrssse_," it said again, whipping one huge claw through the air as though practicing for the blow that would tear them all to shreds. It advanced slowly toward them over the ground they'd managed to cover since leaving the swamp, a distance that seemed all too short now that it was all that separated them from it. As it came, it trailed its shadowy body behind, remaining connected to the swamp as though it depended on the pit of death behind it for power.

"ESCAPE THIS!" shouted Cyborg suddenly, the first to turn his fright into fight and strike out at the creature that threatened to end him and his friends. Gripping his gun arm with his left, Cyborg sighted at the leading hand, blasting it with a wavering blue beam as it wove toward them through the air. The beam caught the beast's hand perfectly, and it screamed with pain as a black burn was traced down the side of its bleached bone talon.

"We... can hurt it?" asked Beast Boy, stunned to see the terrifying beast reel from the relatively small burn Cyborg had given it.

"Yes, and burning is something I happen to excel at!" screamed Starfire, charging a starbolt in each hand and firing up her eyes as well for good measure. Bringing her hands together, she formed a single huge sphere of green power, allowing it to grow to the size of a large beach ball before shooting twin green eye lasers through it. The lasers carried the huge starbolt with them, the collective energy shrieking through the air with a smell of ozone and impacting beautifully with the hideous demonic skull that still flew toward them. The explosion of vaporizing energy was spectacular, she having used enough to turn a building into a pile of dust and charred metal. When the green smoke cleared, the monster was missing a huge chunk of its skull and its left horn, the gaping hole in its head revealing a hollow cavity within.

"FOOLS, you think you can harm me?" the demon shrieked in a voice far more human sounding that before. His threat was somehow reduced by the fact that his injured hand was covering the gaping hole in his skull, even as his other hand drew back to strike down at them.

Working together, Starfire fired two green beams from her hands and Cyborg added a blue one of his own, piercing the third talon together and burning a hole straight through it. Venting a final scream of pain, the demon's solid parts faded in a swirl of shadow, the whole dark mist of him drawing quickly back into the swamp from whence he came. The celebration was magnificent.

Once they were sure the thing was gone, Starfire spontaneously jumped up and wrapped her arms around Cyborg's neck, hanging from his huge shoulders as she fairly screamed in glee. Beat Boy was shouting incoherently in elation, jumping up and down a few times before turning around and giving Cyborg a huge low-five. Cyborg himself, who had felt particularly aware of his own mortality for a long moment there, merely smiled and enjoyed the celebration of the other two, discarding his usual victory ritual of 'the booyah dance' for simple appreciation of his continuing life. They were a tad premature with this.

"_HUMANS_!" shouted the demonic voice, louder than ever before, startling them from their celebration. "You may have defeated me, but _we are LEGION_, and we will _never_ rest as long as you still draw breath, _so is our curse!_" When the booming voice had died down to an unpleasant memory, Cyborg noticed movement along the tree line of the swamp before them.

"Uh... guys. We may want to give getting out of here another thought," he said nervously as the distant sight began to sink in.

"But you said our vehicle would not move until repaired?" asked Starfire, wondering what in the world could motivate Cyborg into leaving one of his precious machines.

"Still, we're a _tad_ outnumbered here," he responded, indicating the now easily visible unbroken line of undead... _things_, now marching toward them out of the swamp. To say that there were lots of them would be stupid, because of course there were a lot of them. Much more interesting to note that there were TONS of them, more than the population of some countries. They marched out of the woods, row after row along a front that was three miles long if it was one, stretching from one barren horizon to the other. Moonlight glinted off of bones and rotting flesh beyond number, a veritable tide of dispossessed, soulless bodies striding steadily toward them, stepping in perfect time to some inaudible, forsaken beat.

Despair was a sensation for those who had some hope left, and that was one thing the three warriors lacked at this point. Watching the army of death stride forth from the swamp was like listening to one's own death rattle, so certain did it cement their own demises into their minds. Cyborg was the first to make a movement then, charging his blaster and testing his joints methodically as he stared at advancing doom.

"You two can fly, so there's a chance you can get away," he said calmly already resigning himself to the destruction to come.

"We would not dream of leaving you to do this alone!" Starfire spat indignantly, warming her powers up for yet another battle. The green fire in her eyes still burned brightly, hope for life gone but a warrior's determination steeling her for combat.

"Yeah, besides, they'll chase us to our graves, so it's not like turning tail would help us anyway," Beast Boy's humor shining through as he thought of the most destructive things he could possibly become. "Oh, and, I _know_ it's pretty late, but you have to admit, I _was_ right about the swamp."

"Oh _come on_ man!" Cyborg complained, his resolve faltering slightly for Beast Boys poorly timed jokes.

"Admit it!" Beast Boy was obviously trying to go out with his pride, and Cyborg decided now was not the time to deny requests, especially ones likely to be of the final variety.

"Fine. I was wrong and you were right. Happy now? Is that what you wanted to hear?"

"...Nah. It wasn't quite as satisfying as I'd always figured it'd be."

"Damn."

"Yeah... NOT! HA! YES! That was just as great as I always dreamed! And to think I actually heard it once before I... died..." Beast Boy trailed off into silence, his perfect moment sort of tarnished by the circumstances.

With that the chatter stopped, and for a long time there was nothing but the sound of the slow advance of the enemy. There was no anticipation, no fear, just a common resolve to fight it out to the very end. It was about this time that Caspar chimed in.

"_Uh, boss_?"

"This is not a good time Caspar," Starfire snapped out loud, drawing curious stares from Beast Boy and Cyborg.

"_Well, I was just going to say that Sky is communicating with me from the real world. He says he's about to remove the damaged parts of your spirit, and that it might cause some changes to the world around here. He specifically said, 'look out below.'_"

"I fail to see how his warning could be of any possible aid to us at this point!" Caspar ignored her frustrated snappishness, instead continuing with the rest of the message.

"_He also says that he's sorry for any wooziness or fatigue you might feel when he does it, but that he's sure it will help you heal faster in the long run._"

"What is this you speak of?" and Starfire's frustration was serious now, Caspar's commentary completely throwing her determination. Beast Boy was explaining the concept of spirit guides to Cyborg quickly, assuring him that their newest ally hadn't snapped under the pressure, when it happened.

Without warning, the sky above them lit with a bright silver light, as if the moon had suddenly decided to try its hand at being the sun, illuminating the landscape with an ethereal glow that seemed to cool the spirit and energize the mind. As their eyes were drawn upward, a single shining, silver line spread endlessly across the heavens, a bar of pure spun starlight stretching through the sky. Suddenly, like some great curtain of the cosmos unrolling, the line grew downward with breathtaking speed, striking the ground in instants and separating the undead horde from the three heroes.

The sparkling ribbon then proceeded to sweep across the ground away from them, taking with it the top layer of barren soil, and, eventually, the front most ranks of the opposing army. The heroes watched in awe as the ribbon proceeded to grind the creatures up from front to back, pushing them away from end to end along their entire enormous battle line. Soon, the ribbon reached the edge of the swamp, carrying with it the soulless minions of the curse. With the sound of general destruction on a massive scale, the ribbon proceeded to tear up the swamp mercilessly, scraping it away like so much mud off the bottom of a boot. It was a big swamp, and the ribbon was not moving that fast, so the entire process took quite a long time, but it finally finished, the astonished trio standing in quiet awe the entire time.

"Does someone want to tell me what the hell just happened here?" Beast Boy asked at length, watching still as the upper part continued to stretch into the sky, even though the leading edge had gone over the distant horizon ages ago. Before anyone could answer, the ribbon began wrapping itself up at a pace not the slightest bit hindered by the megatons of earth, tree, and undead warrior it took with it. As it became merely a line again, and then shrunk to a single bright point in the sky, all three stared on in renewed amazement. In a final act, it split into two parts, a single red streak flashing out of it and into space, and a bright spot slowly growing brighter and brighter. After a long moment of stunned silence, Cyborg noted something interesting about the growing white blob in the sky.

"IT'S HEADING STRAIGHT FOR US!" he shouted, smacking his hands to the sides of his head in fear and stupefaction. How many times was he going to be certain of his own death tonight? Following the example of the quick thinking Beast Boy, Cyborg leapt from the carriage and proceeded to put some distance between him and it, as much as it hurt him to leave one of his babies defenseless like that, he knew it was it or him. It was a long moment then before he noticed the absentee among them (an interesting oxymoron, that).

"Where's Starfire?" he asked, when he'd finally caught up with Beast Boy and the changeling had morphed back from gazelle form. Beast Boy's eyes only widened in fear, answering with a horrified, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, finger point back toward the carriage. Not needing to turn to know what was meant by this, Cyborg merely allowed his head to tilt back in shock, eyes advancing toward the starry sky as a strange calm enveloped him. He noted bemusedly that the ball of light seemed to be coming from a different direction now. Putting two and two together, he snapped out of his euphoric shock, shouting, "MY GOD! There're more of them things!" before turning at last to look back at Starfire.

As his eyes caught sight of her slender from flying about forty feet above his autocarriage, he had about half an instant to admire her grace in flight before no less than four enormous spheres of white light impacted with her simultaneously. There was no flash, there was no bang, there was only a slight emission of silver sparks from the combination of four spheres of billowing energy around one suddenly hard to see young beauty. The process lasted only a few moments, and suddenly Starfire was falling swiftly to the ground, white light completely gone.

"Quick! Give me a boost!" shouted Beast Boy insistently, smacking the still stunned Cyborg on his steel chassis with a resounding clang. Not questioning even momentarily, Cyborg picked up the smaller man and wound up for a huge pitch, flinging him out into space the next instant as hard as his magically powered body could manage. Swooping up into the air, Beast Boy covered the ascent faster than any of his animal forms could possibly have managed, transforming only when he'd reached sufficient height for his idea to work. In a quick writhing of green flesh, he'd become a wyvern, swooping down in a high speed dive that caught up with Starfire's own uncontrolled decent in instants. Grabbing her with his massive claws, he spread his wings, letting the twin leathery sails catch their combined weight on the air and pulling out of the dive a matter of inches from the freshly plowed wasteland behind the carriage.

Beast boy landed and changed back, leaning down to check for vital signs in the still woman beneath him. Finding a strong pulse with ease and feeling her breathing almost right away, he let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding, allowing himself fall back onto the desolate soil. In a moment, Cyborg arrived, his clanging footsteps shaking the ground under Beast Boy's back. After assuring him that Starfire was fine, the two of them rested together, this time _really_ sure that they were done with the whole matter.

"That was _weird_," observed Beast Boy as he stared up at the now super-ribbon free sky.

"Tell me about it," confirmed Cyborg, not really able to think of anything else to add to such an all-encompassing comment. Something shiny caught his eye the next moment though, and he asked offhandedly what it might be. Beast Boy checked it out himself and confirmed his own ignorance on the matter.

The object in question was a brilliant geometric shape gently cradled in Starfire's still right hand, the one with the snake tattoo coming out of it. It looked like a perfectly transparent crystal ball with a multi-faceted three-dimensional star embedded within it, the kind of jagged and many-pointed shape often used to represent the Star of Bethlehem in Christmas decorating. The sphere glowed with an internal light that was strangely reminiscent of the comforting and soothing glow the sky had given off during the undeniably magical occurrence of only a few moments ago. It seemed somehow cold, and eased the tension weighing on the minds of the two young men with a cool refreshing power that seemed to shoot straight into their eyes as they gazed at it.

"I don't know what it is, but I figure she may—hell, she may know all about what just happened—and we shouldn't touch it until we know what the hell it does," Cyborg decided commandingly, taking the lead as he often did when Robin wasn't around. "Come on man, I'll put her in the passenger compartment, then you're going to help me fix the engines. All the weird shit that just went down doesn't change the fact that we're supposed to meet Raven at the Temple of Azar by midday tomorrow."

The two of them walked the short distance back to the carriage, Cyborg carrying the unconscious warrior woman, careful not to touch the mysterious sphere that seemed attached to her right hand. Once they had her squared away, Cyborg lit his shoulder lamp once more and the two got to work on the rather minor damage to the engine.

"You know," Cyborg said after a while, something amusing occurring to him as a kind of afterthought, "We may have to reexamine something that was said earlier."

"What are you talking about now?"

"It's just that, well, we're fine right?"

"Yeah, what of it?"

"Doesn't that mean that, technically, _I_ was right about the swamp?"  
"_WHAT_?"

The Temple of Azar, one hour _after_ midmorning, the next day

The autocarriage rolled swiftly up the twisting hilly paths that lead to the isolated structure nestled at the foot of the Mountains of Agony. Done over in a distinctly gothic motif, the towering cathedral had a multitude of leaping spires and bell towers, its tallest tower graced with a fabulous stained-glass window that reached nearly the entire central wall up to the highest leaps of carved stone. The building was set directly into a crevice in an enormous mountain wall, so that even its tallest point was still a huge distance beneath the lowest cliffs of the monumental stone behind it. It was rarely visited, but those visitors were powerful, so the roads leading there were all well-paved, leading directly up to a courtyard overshadowed by the towering mountain it lay beneath.

Pulling into the courtyard, Cyborg was a little nervous to notice that there was no one waiting for them. Usually, the woman they were coming to meet with was the type to be there at the door to greet you, not so much from fondness as a desire to get started as quickly as possible. He had driven all night long to get here, but the huge delay at the swamp and the disgustingly slow progress they made through the scraped up ground had been terrible time-wasters, and fear began to weigh down on him as he began to imagine what she would be like if they'd kept her waiting so long that she'd gone back inside. He actually sat indecisively on the stopped vehicle as he tried to decide if he liked Robin enough to face the image he'd thought of, but the decision was taken out of his hands by the appearance of a sudden dark presence to his left on the ground.

"Right on time I see," said a quiet, neutral voice that none the less made Cyborg nearly jump out of his metal plating in fright.

"DAMN! Raven, you know I _can't_ _stand_ _it_ when you do that!" he shouted, turning to look down at the familiar young woman who he'd shared many an adventure with in past years.

Her slight, dark form was shrouded in an unadorned robe of extremely fine blue material. The robe covered most of her body in plain folds of cloth, leaving only her face and her arms past her elbow exposed. Her arms were otherwise covered in the skintight embrace of jet black sleeves belonging to something she wore under the robe, these coming all the way down to wrap around her hands. The robe had a hood she could wear to shroud her features, and often did when she was feeling moody or during combat. It could also open up down the front along invisible folds, but Cyborg had only eve seen this once, and the things she'd done with the extra mobility had been scary enough that he didn't care to be in a situation where she did it again. She was Raven, the greatest warrior-priestess of Azar. Well, technically, the _only_ warrior priestess of Azar, but that was a damn long story.

"Live with it," she responded calmly to his complaint about her teleportation, fixing him with an icy glare that made him incredibly uncomfortable. It quickly became clear that she expected him to speak next, so he nervously ventured the best phrasing he'd managed to come up with so far.

"I... uh... well... sorry we're late. It was kind of an eventful trip. 'May you live in interesting times,' and all that, if you get my drift."

"Not at all," and Cyborg couldn't tell if she meant his allusion or his apology or what, "like I said, you're right on time."

"You mean you _expected_ us to be late? C'mon Rae, can't you ever give us the benefit of the doubt?" Cyborg desperately tried to substitute offense to cover his own embarrassment and nervousness.

"I had a vision saying you'd either be one hour, one week, or one month late. I believe I did give you the benefit of the doubt." Her icy response blew away his attempts at offence without mercy, leaving him sadly without anything resembling pride or confidence. More or less at her mercy then, he was gratified when she actually granted it for once, leaving off of rubbing in his failure to meet her simple request of punctuality and changing the subject to work with, "So, did you get the items I asked for?"

"Uh, yeah, sure thing. Everything you needed is right here in the wagon. I had a hard time finding some of it though, stuff like this is rare since the war."

"I'm sure the priestesses will appreciate your tireless efforts. We can only hope they appreciate it enough to hold up their part of the bargain. Come on, let's get this stuff in there and start the ceremony."

"Hold on a sec... don't you want to know why we were late?" asked Cyborg, hoping to win back some brownie points with the juicy information he'd gathered on the trip here. He knew Raven would just _love_ what he knew, and he was betting it would be enough to gain some grain of respect back out of her.

"I had assumed it was the same old story of you running out of power and/or Beast Boy getting into trouble with princesses. It always is." Nonetheless, she fixed him with the steady gaze of her complete attention, willing to at least listen to what he felt was important enough to interrupt their effort to save Robin.

"Well, you wouldn't have happened to have noticed a bright light in the sky southeast of here would you?" he asked as he climbed off the carriage and stood looking down at the shorter woman.

"No, of course not, how could I have noticed a light that consumed the very sky itself? Especially one that has apparently also consumed one of the most grievously accursed places on the planet? A light that, if the reports sent by pigeon and telepathy from priestesses abroad are to be believed, had three sister lights that consumed the other three most grievously accursed places in the entire world? Seriously now, why would I have noticed something like that?"

"Sheesh, okay! Enough with the sarcasm already, it was just a question." Raven met his complaint with a new icy glare, clearly waiting for him to spit out what he felt was so important.

"Right, well, it just so happened that we were in the vicinity of that swamp when the light came down to smite it and—"

"Do you mean to tell me that you were near the swamp I specifically told you to stay away from?" and there was a submerged heat to her tone that renewed Cyborg's nervousness in a flash.

"Oh, yeah, you did say something like that... but no one really believes in curses like that, and we needed to shave some time after the delays of me running out of power and Beast Boy getting into trouble with princesses, so..."

"So you walked right into one of the worst curses ever to exist?" Cyborg was damn right cowed by the stirrings of anger in her neutral tone, her ability for intimidation seeming to have grown with the years. "I warned you away from that swamp because it was dangerous. If that light hadn't shown up you'd be dead right now. Please, don't ignore my warnings in the future, your safety is far more important to me than punctuality could ever be."

Her speech was delivered with complete neutrality, but she actually turned away toward the end, probably unable to keep a cool continence due to whatever thoughts that accompanied her touching words. It was at times like this that Cyborg remembered that, before everything else, Raven was their friend, and also that, really, really deep down, she was just a big softie anyway. Not that he'd ever say that to her face.

"I assume you still have some point to make?" Raven said, having regained complete control and turned back to Cyborg.

"Oh, like I was saying, we got a really good look at the ribbon of light scraping that cursed swamp off the face of the map, _and_ then at what happened to the ribbon of light after it disappeared."

"_What_?" and Cyborg could have jumped for joy at the distinct interest in her voice. It looked like he was going to score some respect with this one yet.

"Weeeelllll, you know those blasts of white energy that flashed off from the four places the ribbons were sighted after they disappeared? It turns out that the lights converged on each other, really damn close to where B.B. and I were."

"Go on." Raven clearly didn't enjoy being strung along, but was more than willing to put up with it for info like this. Priestesses of Azar were incredible information collectors, their spy network the greatest in the world.

"More exactly, they converged on _someone_. She was a pretty young warrior we bumped into on the way here that incidentally turned out to be instrumental in our surviving to meet you," and Cyborg completed his statement by walking over to the carriage's passenger compartment doors and popping one open, revealing a figure currently recumbent on the wide padded seats.

"That's Beast Boy." Raven said, more than a little annoyed. Cyborg did a double take, seeing that it was indeed where the young man had passed out that he'd shown Raven. He wished quite explicitly that he had enough leg joint articulation to kick himself, then shut the door and stepped one stride further to the right, grabbing the other door (each side had double doors that open out in opposite directions), he apologized and opened this one.

This time, he got the right one, and the tranquil form of the beautiful young warrior was revealed, also currently lain out on the long seat opposite from the one Beast Boy occupied (passengers face each other to facilitate conversation on long trips). Raven leapt onto the first step up to the passenger compartment to get a closer look, her curiosity eventually prompting her to climb all the way in and gaze down at the girl from above.

A cursory examination revealed nothing exceptionally interesting in her other than the spectacular tattoo that was currently projecting a mysterious energy that Raven couldn't quite place. Other than that, she could sense great power, but nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Actually, there was also something familiar about her, like they'd met somewhere before, but Raven couldn't place this feeling either, so she let it go for now and climbed out of the carriage.

"She's cute, but I don't really see what's so special about her. Are you sure she was the conversion point for those spheres of excess energy?"

"Sure as what I saw with my own eyes! I watched it happen, I even helped Beast Boy rescue her when she fell out of the air!" Cyborg was understandably upset that she was so unimpressed by the spectacular find he'd dug up for her, and proceeded to play his gambit. "I mean, did you get a look at that freaky sphere she was holding? That appeared right after the light struck her, and B.B. and I had no clue what it was."

"What sphere? I didn't see anything like that," responded Raven, narrowing her eyes as she tried to recall anything like what he was talking about.

"Come on (he looks into the carriage)... I can see it from here—there in her right hand. How could you miss something like that?" Cyborg asked, concerned that his normally magnificently observant friend had glazed over something as intrinsically interesting as a glowing sphere with a star-crystal inside of it.

"That tattoo..." Raven mumbled cryptically, a dark look sweeping across her expression as she turned once more to the carriage. "It was emitting a distraction compulsion!" Cyborg recognized that tone and took it upon himself to try and keep Raven from killing someone, following her to the door of the carriage as she climbed back in and stood over the sleeping beauty once more.

"Come on Raven, I'm sure her spirit guide was just trying to protect it from thieves or something!" he shouted in, trying to reason with her.

"You could see it because you'd already gotten a look at it before that mark started hiding it. I couldn't see it because my mind shield didn't consider the energy of the distraction compulsion as hostile... I don't appreciate it when entities mess with my perceptions," and she stared down at the girl's right hand, even now noticing that no matter how hard she tried, her eyes still slid away from its contents every time she set them there.

Getting fed up, she drew deeply on her powers of concentration, forcing her eyes to look at Starfire's right hand, finally breaking the compulsion and getting a look at what had so impressed Cyborg. Truthfully, she wasn't all that unimpressed herself. The sphere was not only beautiful, but it emitted an energy that was clearly oriented toward the healing of mental and spiritual maladies. This being a skill lacking in the Azarath Order, Raven found herself completely absorbed in her examination of the incredible ball of power. She actually found herself drawn to it, wanting desperately to touch it. As she reached her hand slowly toward it then, sudden movement rearranged things quite forcefully.

Without warning, Starfire's free hand flashed up, grabbed her wrist, twisted her arm into a locked position directly forward, and then pushed back with incredible strength that sent Raven flying into the far wall of the carriage. Striking it with a bang, she promptly fell down and landed squarely on Beast Boy's back, causing the young man to gag on his most recent snore and jerk uncontrollably to wakefulness. He emitted a strangled cry as his eyes darted around the compartment, trying to figure out what the heck had just happened.

"RAVEN?" he finally asked, summing up his confusion with the simple question to who was probably the last girl he ever expected to see sitting on his back.

Raven was a little too distracted by her own shock to notice the rather compromising position she was in. All of her attention was focused on the young woman who had just attacked her without provocation, the young girl that had almost broken her arm, the young girl who... was still sleeping? Upon further consideration, Raven could not deny that Starfire had never woken for an instant while throwing her across the room, leaving only one possible conclusion. That damn spirit guide.

"Hey, as much as I enjoy you rubbing your butt on me—"Beast Boy managed to get out, before Raven turned to him with a glare of pure murderous fury.

"Stuff it," she said, somehow managing to mismatch her homicidal glare with a completely cool tone. Extricating herself from Beast Boy's back, she stepped once more across the compartment to stand over Starfire's sleeping form. Starfire had rolled slightly in her sleep, lying on her left arm and leaving her right fully exposed, the crystal orb cradled lovingly to her chest as she rested. This position gave her an excellent look at Starfire's tattoo, and deciding it was time to talk, she reached out with a single finger and touched one of the twirling coils on the outermost part of her upper arm.

"_We have some things to discuss_," she said simply into the sentient marking's mind the instant she'd established mental contact. Her words didn't convey it, but it was impossible to hide her rage over the mental link. Caspar for one wasn't the least bit impressed by her anger, and made no small show of getting this fact across.

"_I don't think we have too much to talk about myself_," he said, warming up to get his powers of annoyance into full gear, finally having a hostile target to use them on after such a long time of being in contact only with people he actually cared about.

"_You attacked me. I consider that a GREAT reason for us to talk_," and Raven was really pouring on the fury now, trying to overwhelm the spirit with pure force.

"_No really? I figured you'd want to talk to share that winning personality of yours. Anyway, I attacked to defend my host, so you can go have a party with any complaints you may have, because I'm sure as hell not going to listen to them_." With that, Caspar severed the connection between the two, leaving a slight sting on Raven's finger and a serious sting to Raven's pride.

"RRRGGGG" she growled uncontrollably, her whole body enveloping with a white-edged black aura of destructive energy as rage consumed her mind. She was verging dangerously on loosing complete control, and recognizing this, Beast Boy took the opportunity to vacate the carriage, transforming into a small green fox and slipping lithely past Raven and Cyborg both, changing back to look on from the relative safety of behind Cyborg's huge metal frame. Cyborg, for his part, was torn between his desire to protect their newest friend and his almost as strong desire to be far away from Raven when she got like this. Raven meanwhile reached down and touched Caspar once more, her rage not showing by her finely controlled movements and smooth reconnection to Caspar's mind.

"_Oh, it's you again. Have something more relevant to share this time do we?_" asked Caspar boldly, his snide tone all the thicker for his intense amusement at her anger.

"_WHY... EXACTLY... DID... YOU... ATTACK?_" Raven managed, coherent thoughts a little difficult with that much anger coursing through her veins.

"_I told you, I had to defend my host._"

"_SO YOU THREW ME AT BEAST BOY?_" she snapped, her anger coalescing slightly and allowing her thoughts to come easier.

"_Hey, I figured you two would make a cute couple. If you guys got together, why, there'd be the pitter-patter of fuzzy green mystics in the house!_" That did it, and Raven lost it completely, spazzing out at an exponential rate. Having had his fun, Caspar took this moment to turn the tables, sending a pulse of energy through the mental connection that she'd formed and bypassing her defenses (which were already shot by her rage-caused lack of concentration) effortlessly. With a flash of power, he pulled the bottom out of her anger and watched it drain down her arm and into his 'stomach' at a truly impressive clip. Her eyes were wide, the emotion drain not having the mind-clearing effect of a simple equalizing, merely leaving her suddenly devoid of feeling where before she'd been controlled by one. Needless to say, she took a moment to reorient her thoughts.

"_What--?_"

"_Never mind that, I've got something to say to you now. That sphere of energy was a gift from Master Skye to Miss Starfire. You have no place touching it without her explicit consent, no matter how much you're drawn to the raw power there. If you'd like a closer look at it, wait for her to wake, then just ask. It's really as simple as that. In the meantime, I'm obligated to protect her interests, and none of your spitfire is going to shake me from that. You were in the wrong, I made a move, get over it—okay?_" and with that closing remark, he snapped their connection once more.

This time, rather than exploding with indignant anger, Raven merely stepped back and took to calm consideration. It had been foolish of her to let herself be baited by the cheeky spirit inhabiting this mysterious woman, and she chastised herself as she once again gazed at the orb. There _was_ power there, and she _had_ been unduly drawn to it, and while that wasn't much of an excuse for what the spirit had done to her, it was enough of one that she shouldn't have gone off like that.

Satisfied at last, she turned and stepped toward the entrance, her enmity with the spirit settling in her mind as she considered the way he'd humiliated her, baited her, then defused her anger like she was some kind of amateur. Next time she wouldn't underestimate him, that was for sure, then they'd see who was the better at the little game they'd been playing. This was more or less her last thought on the matter as she glared at Cyborg and Beast Boy until their stunned faces twisted into nervous smiles and they stopped blocking the entrance. Once out of the carriage, she ignored the confusion at her emotional flip-flop and got back to business.

"Come on, we have to get these supplies into the temple and start negotiations," she said simply, indicating the tarp-covered wagon they'd hauled for so long now.

"Uh, yeah. Do you want to get it or should I?" asked Cyborg, hoping she'd get his drift. She did, perfectly, once again proving to be just as observant as he'd always known, and the confirmation was comforting.

"You go ahead and get it, I'll carry the girl to a more comfortable bed. Beast Boy, you can help Cyborg," she said simply, responding to Cyborg's prompt by choosing exactly what he'd silently asked of her: to carry the unconscious girl for him. Cyborg could handle heavy weights, but he didn't exactly have a delicate touch, and carrying girls around was something guys did in emergencies and intimacies, of which now was neither.

Plans lain clearly, Raven used her power to lift Starfire gently from the carriage seat and convey her toward the building, mind already absorbed in a figure named Skye and how he was able to wipe out the world's four greatest curses in a single sweep, not to mention puzzling over his relation to this mysterious young warrior who seemed so familiar to her. Cyborg took the wagon coupling off with a few quick movements, grabbing the stem where it had been attached to the carriage and dragging it the last few feet toward the door like it was a child's red wagon and not a half-ton of mysterious supplies for an isolated priestess convent. Beast Boy followed after him, finally transforming into a Yeti, helping him unload the heavy 3'x3'x5' boxes and carry them inside.

Temple of Azar Antechamber

"So ladies, this is what I've got for you," began Cyborg, addressing a group of three dozen women both young and old, all dressed in the same blue robes Raven wore. They crowded around the huge man eagerly, wanting to know what he'd brought to their remote home as payment for the services Raven had requested of them. Truthfully they wouldn't have put up with the girl if it hadn't been for promise of this payment, her violation of their order's precepts on non-violence making her something of an outcast among them. In any case, looking for all intents and purposes like a huge metal UPS guy, Cyborg began reading off an inventory list he'd made up himself as he picked up the various things Raven had asked for, knowing as she did exactly what the ladies here were interested in. (AN: any views expressed in the following paragraph in no way represent the author's own opinion of women in general. This is an exaggeration of a particular stereotype of woman that fit the scenario well.)

"Okay, first off, I've got two hundred bars of Heinric's Best Soap, half scented, half unscented," he started, eliciting happy sounds right off the bat. "Next we have one manufacturer's shipping crate full of 'Ye Olde Hair Tonic,' guaranteed to prevent tangling and keep hair at its softest. Moving down the list, there's one crate of this past year's back copies of 'Princess' magazine, assorted face and nail paints, thirty manicure kits, thirty pounds of rich chocolate, and one crate of... (ahem) 'Sanitary Napkins,'" the last he sort of snuck in with the natural male discomfort on that subject. "Last but not least, four hundred rolls of toilette paper, two-ply with aloe." At this point, half the ladies where ready to faint and the other half were fighting over who would get first crack at claiming swag. General bedlam reined until the Abbess stepped forward and began organizing things.

When she was done dispersing the crowd, the tall, extremely angular woman in her particularly nice blue robe strode forward and considered the two young men, the only two men within 50 miles, with extreme dissatisfaction. With curt words and strong gestures, she instructed them to be on their best behavior, specifically detailing all the places they were NOT to go, before having the pure gall to _order_ them to carry the crates full of stuff to the store room for sorting. Beast Boy didn't take it well, but Cyborg smacked a hand on his back _hard_ to curtail any smart ass remarks, reminding him once the old hag had left that they need the temple on their side if they wanted to sneak past the Mountains of Agony and all of Slade's defenses.

Hauling the heavy crates then, Cyborg with one in each hand like they were big pillows, Beast Boy much the same in the form of a sasquatch, they finished in a few trips down the long twisting path to the store rooms below the temple proper. By the time they were done and had returned to the antechamber, they found two familiar ladies waiting for them.

"Friends, it is so good to see you well!" shouted Starfire as she spotted them coming up the narrow stairway from the storage cellars.

"Hey, hey, look who's awake," responded Cyborg, the woman's cheerful voice prompting an immediate smile out of both him and Beast Boy. "You gave us quite a scare with that whole incident by the swamp," he said, trying not to give too much away to the prying ears that were _always_ around in Temples to Azar.

"I am sorry for any trouble I caused you. It was, 'circumstances beyond my control'?" she tried another new turn of phrase she'd been practicing, her success rate actually having gotten pretty good over the past months.

"I think it would be a good idea to take a walk now," broke in Raven, clearly having something she too would like to discuss away from the spies all around them. "Starfire is still recovering, and fresh air would do her good while the priestesses prepare for the ceremony."

"Sounds good, I think we can all do with a little relaxation after the long trip over here," was Cyborg's code response agreeing that a discussion of various things was definitely in order. Beast Boy and Starfire were sort of left out of the loop, each of them thinking Raven had actually suggested some kind of communal recreation, a first in any world, and were quite perturbed by the unprecedented action. Nonetheless, they all filed slowly outside, beginning to chat about this and that in a totally natural manner as they left the building. Once they were gone, no less than four persons slinked stealthily away from various positions of concealment, knowing better than to even bother _trying_ to shadow the likes of Raven across open hills in broad daylight.

The Foothills beneath the Temple

"Do you think we've lost them?" asked Cyborg of Raven after they'd leisurely made their way into the warm afternoon sunlight and out onto the handsome green hills of the vacant countryside beneath the mountains. They walked in a loose line, Beast Boy bouncing along on Cyborg's right as Raven seemed to float along on his left, her strides so even that she seemed to hover as she moved to keep up with his big steps. Starfire actually did hover, floating along vertically a few feet off the ground, just above and behind Cyborg and Raven.

"Oh, we lost them at the door. They haven't bothered tailing me outdoors since a certain... incident... soon after I arrived here a few weeks back." As usual, Raven's tone revealed nothing, the incident could have been a tea party for all the coloring her speech gave it. Cyborg suspected something more serious however, and felt his metal chest fill with pride that this amazing woman was on _their_ side.

"That's our girl, gave 'em hell didn't you?"

"Something like that. In any case, we have a few things to talk about, you and I," and the menace not communicated by her words was more than made up for by that carried in the glare she leveled at them now that they had stopped walking. Cyborg felt ice fill his spine, despite the pleasant warmth of the open fields, and tried to think of anything he might have done to tick her off recently. Coming up empty, he was forced to wait for her to explain herself, never a good situation to be in with Raven.

"Why exactly did you neglect to tell me that our newest ally here was, in fact, Princess of Tamaran, lawfully betrothed of the errant Prince Robin?" she asked, causing no small amount of consternation in the male portion of their group.

"PRINCESS?" shouted Beast Boy, jaw dropping even as he began reevaluating the young warrior on several different levels, not the least of which was 'what are my chances with her?'

"How... I mean, I thought you wanted to keep that a secret?" Cyborg asked Starfire, turning to look up at her, obviously assuming she'd let herself slip to Raven in some way. She was currently floating with her eyes down, staring fixedly at the ground below her as she felt opinions, at least Beast Boy's opinions, shift in a way she'd been trying to avoid.

"I told her nothing. She found out on her own," Starfire said at last, feeling the sting of failure at the memory of Raven confronting her with her secret, seemingly never fooled for a moment by her disguise. It had happened shortly after she'd awoken, Raven standing silently over her and examining her with an inscrutable look on her face, then greeting her with her Tamaranean name.

"I noticed that she looked familiar, though I couldn't really think of why. By chance, I took the long way up to the dormitories through the old portrait hall. Who would have thought that we'd have a full eight by ten (that's in feet for paintings) of the Royal Family of Tamaran hanging there? I wouldn't have believed my own eyes if I hadn't had her right there with me to compare, but it was definitely where I recognized her from." Raven's explanation left Cyborg reaching, his mind missing a few key facts that would have settled things for him rather quickly.

"So let me get this straight," he began, trying to satisfy the ache in his head, "You spotted her through her disguise from some musty old painting hanging in a back hallway of an isolated mountain temple?" Feel free to insert your own look of complete disbelief on Cyborg's face.

"Not exactly, you see, the paintings in the portrait hall are all enchanted. They constantly repaint themselves to keep track of the actual appearance of the members of the family they are attuned to. It's a slow process, but so is aging, so it usually doesn't matter. The clincher for my believing what I saw was simple however: I could see a white tattoo beginning to appear on her portrait's neck, just above the line of her dress."

Cyborg shook his head in wonder, having little choice but to believe what he was hearing. Raven went on to describe the incredible advantage having such an important political figure on their side could mean, how it opened doors she'd never considered before. Apparently she'd described these things to Starfire, who had reluctantly agreed to drop the façade of mere knighthood for her own titles in the many dealings to come. Specifically she mentioned something along the lines of trying to end the war by having Robin and Starfire marry, making the war a clear treaty violation and more than likely bringing in neutral powers like the Kingdom of Metropolis. None of them were terribly enthusiastic about this forced union, but discussion kind of ended there with Beast Boy's sudden exclamation.

"HOLY CRAP! Do you guys see what I see?" he asked, pointing off toward where the road disappeared behind a distant hill. He'd been sulking off to one side since Raven dropped her bomb, thinking of all the chances to put the moves on Starfire that he'd missed thinking she was just a really good warrior. Warrior princess though? That was like the best kind! As he lamented opportunities lost then, he'd gazed off at the landscape, making him the first to notice the ranks of marching figures pounding around the crest of the foothills.

"It can't be..." Cyborg said, disbelief coloring his voice in a much less pleasant way than it had with Raven's story.

"The bastards must have tracked us after the run in with Dominic in the forest!" and Beast Boy once again regretted his choice not to transform into an elephant and make that scumbag into toe jam.

"Just perfect. If they catch us up here, the Temple will loose its political immunity. Do you know what the likes of Dominic will do with a detachment of golems and a building full of defenseless maiden priestesses?" asked Raven grimly, even as she began scouting around for goodly sized erratic boulders and rock outcroppings to use in the coming battle.

"He will do _nothing_, not if I _burn_ _off_ his _shnashpalps_ first," said Starfire, her eyes becoming green novas as starbolts began to play about her clenched fists. This comment caused Cyborg and Beast Boy to exchange pale stares, each of them surreptitiously covering their important bits for a moment at the thought of what waited Dominic if Starfire was the one to get a hold of him. (Note: shnashpalps is one of many Tamaranean words for 'hand')

"I'll scout their numbers, B.B., help me out here man," stated Cyborg, trying to get his mind off the thought of burning and what he assumed shnashpalps were. Touching a button on the metal plating of his skull, he caused some changes in the structure of his magical eye, slowly causing it to telescope out of his head. Much like a telescope, it gave him a magnified view of the enemy's ranks, and he began to tally quickly as Beast Boy landed on his shoulder in the form of an eagle, gazing out to help him count.

"Starfire," began Raven, drawing the furious girl's attention, "You haven't fought Slade's forces before, so I'm going to go over their tactics for you. They always do the same thing, basically just forming into ranks and using their durability and magical firepower to their advantage. It isn't exactly pretty, but they managed to flatten Gotham's army before King Batman developed useful countermeasures. Since we can't limit the size of their ranks on the open hills, we're going to have to flank them. We're faster than the boys, so we'll have to go around the sides and try to roll them up. The guys'll take up a defensive position in the center to try and break their charge and draw their fire." As she spoke, she glanced around the area, using her powers to collect various boulders and place them in what Starfire assumed were strategic positions. As she finished stripping the landscape, she said, "First however, we might as well use the high ground to our advantage."

"I do not understand," began Starfire, slightly confused by what Raven was telling her. "Why should the golems charge? They cannot possibly know our exact position, why do they not merely march into the temple and search for us there?"

"Slade's forces never take any chances," Raven answered, when she realized Starfire's question actually had and intelligent and tactics-savvy point behind it, "They _always_ charge whenever there is the slightest chance of engagement. Golems are such easy targets while stationary that they always want to be moving if an ambush should take place, as it's about to here. This sitting-duck defect is what King Batman learned to take advantage of, and what we're about to use against them ourselves." Starfire nodded, finally getting a good idea of what was about to happen. As she continued to charge two glowing starbolts behind the cover of the ridge, Cyborg and Beast Boy finished their task.

"Looks bad, I count seventy of the man sized ones and twenty of the bigger ones," Cyborg said, retracting his eye back into his head. Around the same time, Beast Boy reverted to human, not bothering to get off Cyborg's shoulder as he confirmed the numbers.

"Plus, if I'm not seeing things, that's Masonstone forming up at the center with Dominic riding on his back." He added, having seen them come around the mountain crest after Cyborg had stopped counting.

"Huh, I wonder how that little shit managed to score Slade's number one errand freak?" Cyborg mused as he transformed his right arm back into a cannon and surveyed the steep slope of the hill the enemy would be charging up any minute now. Even as he asked, the army finished coming around the hill valley at the far end of the long, slow incline that led up to the temple, forming up in classic golem assault lines for the inevitable charge.

The smaller golems looked like stone masked men, the small objects wrapped around their uniform right hands being magic blasters that, along with their strength and speed, made them exceptionally deadly. The larger golems looked like poorly made statues, all smoothed off curves in bear-like proportions, wicked metal claws on the hands and feet having terrible destructive strength, the large, red, cyclopean eyes set into their cylinder heads able to shoot magic blasts of their own.

The small ones lined up in an advance formation two rows deep and 35 columns across. The big ones formed up behind them, two rows of ten. Masonstone's huge from brought up the rear, Dominic's shock of blond hair shining in the distance from where he perched on the huge stone beast's back for safety.

"He probably just dropped our names and got a blank check from whoever was in command of this force. We are pretty notorious y'know. War criminals and all that," responded Beast Boy to his big friend's question.

"What makes you say there's another commander?" asked Cyborg as he tested his aim, sighting down his arm and checking his joints in a longtime pre-battle ritual of his.

"Well, he couldn't have picked up these troops in a town, there'd be no way for him to keep up with us after a detour like that. They must have been out on patrol, or on assignment or something, and he just bumped into them on the road. Anyway, when was the last time you saw Masonstone _leading_ golems?" Beast Boy sounded more than a little full of himself, and Raven took the opportunity to knock him down a few pegs, just to keep him sharp.

"Wow," she said, not the slightest hint of actual awe in her tone, "you _actually_ made a relevant and comprehensive observation. Congratulations. Now I'd be _really_ impressed if you hadn't lifted nearly the whole speech from what Robin said that time they had us cornered in Westwood."

"Heh heh haa, yeah. Well, I was just applying experience to the situation."

"Cut the chatter, they're on the way," Cyborg snapped, and sure enough, the smaller golems began to move. They were slow to begin with, moving in a few jerky strides to the start of the incline, then took off at high speed. Leaping back and forth up the hill at a disgusting pace, the golems had closed half the huge distance to the heroes' hiding place on the ridge in no time at all, all seventy of them charging toward the temple, no idea in their automaton minds that there was quite a spectacular trap waiting for them.

Signaling the start of the ambush, Raven muttered her magic words, her whole body taking on a black glow as she simultaneously lifted every stone she'd lain along the lip of the hill they were hiding behind. Ranging in size from watermelon to tractor, the enormous and disassociate load tested both her strength and her skill, but it was a maneuver she'd had cause to use before, and with a grunt of effort, she managed to fling all the various debris forward with a decent initial velocity, letting gravity do the work from there. The avalanche rained down on the advancing statues like a meteor shower of rolling destruction, each stone bounding and twirling over the slope with its own unique path of demolition. Where smaller stones impacted with high-speed golems, arms, legs, heads, or whole bodies were dashed to pieces in an explosive crumbling of one rock against another. Where the huge, completely unstoppable boulders went, only the wide, thin line the golem's had utilized saved them, three and four being rolled over at a time, not even well-placed magic blasts deflecting the overrunning granite, instead merely creating smaller projectiles to rain nearly equivalent destruction over a larger area. By the clouds of dust that went up everywhere, Cyborg estimated 40 casualties, but then the remaining dozens were already past the point of impact and another fourth of the way up to the hill's crest.

Raven was keeled over, but taking a few quick breaths, she nodded to Starfire and melted into the ground like ink, the leftover pool swirling away to nothing as she removed herself to her flanking position. Starfire in turn leaned back and put on a burst of speed, flying inches above the ground to remain concealed behind the hill's peek, zipping all the way back to the very edge of the enemy formation just as it came leaping over the peek and onto the plateau beyond, the hopping golems now going headlong for the final slope up to the temple. As she took her opportunity to shoot up into the air and get an _ideal_ firing position, Cyborg kind of... "interrupted" their progress.

With an explosive shout of "BOOYAH!" his arm erupted with blue energy, lashing out in a line that shattered the nearest three golems from behind in the miniscule moment between their landing after clearing the peek and their next leap. The golems, ignoring as per programming the inanimate assault from the boulders, now turned their attention backward, many of them from midair, as an active enemy appeared, also per programming. Here's where the King's genius comes in.

The golems, extremely mobile when in full gear, have the turning radius of a _big_ boat (like a fucking battleship), and thus their ability to respond to attacks from behind (while at attack speed anyway) is somewhere between pathetic and embarrassing. And yet, their magi-conditioning mandates that they respond to new threats like that whenever they lack a specific objective ('attack the temple ' doesn't count). So, the whole damn cavalcade of them reduced speed, coming to a halt as they turned to train an array of potential destruction at one metal man and one green man. There was an audible hiss as forty-something magic blasters charged, thus the flanking maneuver.

With Raven rising from a pool of shadow on the left and Starfire bearing down from the right, the stopped golems transformed from an array of death in tableau to so many big stone targets.

Raven began this time too, sweeping her arm expansively through the air, she sent a black blade of solidified air radiating out in a scythe of destruction, bisecting a path of golems thirty feet wide and stretching from her to the hillside behind the twenty-something stone men she'd just shortened at the waist. Starfire, who'd been charging her fists for the past three minutes, flung first one blast, then a second, somersaulting for force and leaving a few feet of space between them. The two fusion charges were so immense that they actually pulled on one another, twisting through the air like enormous wrestling fireflies and striking the ground with simultaneous bursts of incinerating energy. Those golems within about ten feet of the blast were vaporized instantly. One who just made the grade was only partially vaporized, its other side getting a half-instant reprieve before the shockwave from the explosion eradicated it and everything else within an additional twenty feet.

Cyborg and Beast Boy used the moment of smoke-filled confusion after the green flash to charge off at the last survivors. They themselves had had a little trouble with that shockwave, but that didn't slow them from their own attacks. With a flying leap, Cyborg came down on two with open arms, crushing them to pebbles with a huge falling body slam. The last two, who had miraculously avoided Raven's and Starfrie's attacks, actually got some shots off, lancing out with orange lines of fire at the green serpent that slithered toward them. Beast Boy finally changed into a bull, coming up from the ground with a butting motion that smacked the first one into the sky even as it shattered, then reversed the motion left and beat the second one onto the ground, where he proceeded to trample it for a while. Less the world seventy golems.

The ambush had been a crushing success, all of the enemy's light units eradicated in a matter of seconds. Celebration would have been premature however, because they were still outnumbered five to one, and that counted neither Masonstone nor the mysterious other commander and whatever forces he or she might bring. And, oh yeah, they _didn't_ have the element of surprise anymore.

Nothing made this fact clearer than the sudden concentrated magic fire that erupted from the bottom of the slope, red lances of heat lashing up and out at the most prominent target the curvature of the incline allowed to them: Starfire. For her part, she managed to avoid dozens of blasts as she fought her way down to the cover offered by the hill crest, but heavy golems are _really_ good at coordinating fire. With a cry, she was winged by one blast, a black scorch mark etching along her left shoulder even as she twisted to avoid another three blasts that would have fried her head and chest. As she pretty well fell the last ten feet to the ground, she used her last moment of attack angle to fling a quick counter blast in the general direction of her assailants, but the explosion disappeared behind hill's green peak, and none knew if it had connected.

"Are you alright?" queried Cyborg, all question and virtually no concern. He had gotten past the point of worrying how she felt, knowing that as a warrior, she would take it as any of them would, but he needed to know if they had a fighter down. Even as he kept an ear out for her response, he flung himself over the the top of the hill and pointed his cannon at the advancing heavy golems. He had had enough time to fire off a couple of reflexive, unaimed, completely ineffective shots and get a good look at nineteen glowing red circles before he heard her reply.

"It is nothing!" Starfire shouted, not really sure if he heard her as he flung himself backward and rolled away from the crest, closely followed by roaring red beams so concentrated that they burnt away the hill itself and left a huge boiling pit of molten earth in the hillside where Cyborg had been instants before. Starfire's 'wound' was little more than a stinging black mark where heat enough to flash-melt steel had met Tamaranean skin, and she was more embarrassed that she'd let them hit her than actually hurt. Cyborg lifted only his head from his prone position, a look of annoyance and frustration stretching across his face. Thinking quickly, he snapped out a quick plan of attack.

"Raven, you flank from the back, get them where their eyes can't get ya back. B.B., you find a way to get in close on the right, but watch out for Masonstone, I didn't see him when I took those pot shots. Starfire, take a trip high around the side and watch our backs, we still don't know where that other commander is."

"What will you do?" asked Raven, raising her voice over the sound of the suppression fire that constantly sizzled overhead, the golem's firing blindly as they advanced toward the top of the hill, each shot coming closer and closer to the fighters' heads. Cyborg merely sat up, brought his cannon up next to his face, and gave her a truly frightening look out of his human eye.

"I'll take another go over the top," he said, almost too softly to hear over the racket. The angle of red beams frying along the ridge told them the golems were only a dozen feet from the peak, so the four of them split up, taking a near miss along Beast Boy's hair (ah, his poor hair, is nowhere safe?) as their go signal.

Always the mobile one, Raven was once again the first to move, fading into a classic teleportation shadow in the shape of her moniker, black wings spreading across the ground as she swept forward and under the clueless nonliving enemies. Beast Boy moved up over the hill on the right, taking a moment out of the line of fire in the form of a field mouse, creeping through the grass and thinking up something particularly destructive to become when he reached point blank range. As the first line of ten golems reached a place where their slight hovering position would let them train their cannons over the crest and down at their opponents last known position, only empty fields greeted their red eyes. As they tried to reacquire their targets, their targets had surrounded them.

Cyborg, as was his want, came over the top. With a sound like a thunderclap, he came down from a power leap so huge that his initial rocket into the air (aided slightly by a boost from Starfire and some lift jets he'd secreted into his legs) had completely passed their opponent's notice, leading back down with two huge metal feet and a single glowing orb of energy on the tip of his cannon pointed between his legs at his unwitting landing pads. Like a blue comet, he instantly crushed two of the central leading golems, the blast of air and magic energy from his reentry smacking the other hovering behemoths to the earth without discrimination. Leaping out of a four foot crater from his perch on two piles of ruble and bent steel, he immediately grabbed up one of the fallen brutes by his wickedly clawed paw and flipped its damned enormous weight around in a shoulder throw that smashed a second sprawled statue to bits.

As he turned to do the same to another, he spotted Raven crushing two with brute force, her telekinetic grip literally grinding to bits a pair she'd snapped up from where he'd knocked them. Mostly-busted golem still ready for bludgeoning, Cyborg used it to smash another as it struggled to right itself, cumbersome limbs barely articulate enough to tilt it back up to a hover position. He also then spotted Beast Boy making his presence known in the form of a small (only about, 20' long) hydra, each of his three snake-like necks wrapped around a different golem as he crushed them in a constrictor's grip, immensely tough scales only barely able to hold back the terrible rending force of their arms before he crushed them beyond use.

When a red beam smacked into his armor and left a glowing red spot on his cold steel body, Cyborg was brought back to strictly his own concerns, flinging the now disembodied arm into that golem's eye and bringing his cannon to bear yet again. As he disassembled that one with a series of frantic blasts, he dodged a blow that would have taken his arm off and ducked away from a second beam, coming back to his knee and plugging yet another golem at extreme close range. The other was back the next instant, and only a sudden burst of green light kept his head on his shoulders.

Starfire's support fire next took out a golem that tried to swat Raven into a bloody pulp from behind while she used her black grip to yank at the one slashing at Beast Boy's hydra tail. Hovering thirty feet in the air, Starfire was free to rain down destruction with impunity, the big lugs so busy with her friends that not so much as a single red eye turned her direction. She got another assist a moment later on two ganging up on Raven when she vaporized an arm that would have gutted the levitating mystic while she was occupied with slicing another to bits, the dark woman's blades of black energy finishing what Starfire started moments later as the thing's eye beam charged up for a go. The Tamaranean amazon's green beams melted down one after another of the stony foes, a quick ball of green energy smiting down her fifth kill with a radiant flash as Cyborg gave the last straggler a pitch toward gryphon B.B. and the airborne bird-beast ripped the statue apart with his talons. Starfire was then in a perfect position to take a look around and figure out what had happened to the rest of their opponents.

As it turned out, the reason none of them had seen Masonstone attacking was simply because he hadn't attacked. A quick inspection of the valley from her high vantage point showed Dominic's blond hair shining from atop Masonstone in exactly the position he taken when the golems began their attack. As the others regrouped beneath her, each nursing slight injuries, they all advanced slowly down the hill to the stationary giant and his snidely smirking passenger. They approached to a cautious distance, Starfire, Raven, and Cyborg all training energy blasts at their massive opponent, wondering why he hadn't attacked but not willing to give up hope of surrender.

"Ah, if it isn't the old Black Knight core squad, reunited at last," said Dominic arrogantly when they had all come to a stop at about twice Masonstone's huge reach away from him. "I see you picked up the little black birdie that we've been searching for, though you seem to be _short_ one red-feathered friend."

"Cut the crap Dominic, I'm not in the mood. Now you and that ugly-butt horse you're riding can come quietly, and _maybe_ I won't be forced to kick the living shit out of the both of you!" Cyborg fairly spat his ultimatum at the stationary pair, _whishing_ they'd try something so he'd have an excuse.

"I have a better idea," and he had nothing but contempt and a manic smile for Cyborg's threat, "Why don't _you _surrender, hand over that pretty little priestess and the Tamaranean whore, and maybe I'll let you live a little longer than I had planned to. Yesss, I think you'd enjoy the show I'd put on while exacting my revenge from that red-haired tramp—and the priestess for dessert—"

His fantasy was interrupted by a sudden flash of green heat lancing out of Starfire's glowing eyes, the target obviously being his good hand where it pressed against Masonstone's shoulder. A quick jerk from the stone giant, his first movement so far, forced the beam to strike his shoulder, leaving a spot of stone hot enough to cook an egg on. When he regained his breath after the sudden jolt, Dominic screamed in rage and gripped his unharmed hand to his chest protectively, then burst out in sudden, completely unhinged laughter.

"HAHHAHHAHAHHAhaha, nice try _slut_! I think you'll find me harder to hurt this time however. You see, I've moved up in the world since you took my right hand the other day. The moment I reported to Lord Slade's expeditionary force with your whereabouts, I was given an immediate promotion to lieutenant, and my big friend here was assigned to protect me as I lead my own force to kill or capture you and the other conspirators."

"Hellooo? Earth to Dominic? In case you didn't notice, we already wasted your stupid golems, so I don't exactly see what makes you so confident here!" shouted Beast Boy, who'd had more than enough of his old foe's ranting for one lifetime.

"FOOL! You disposed of some useless obsolete model golems, Lord Slade's main force is coming behind me, not even ten miles behind my point force. You should see the new models, they're to _die_ for."

"Man, what makes you think we can't kick your sorry ass and be out of here before the rest of your goons show up?" asked Cyborg, his trigger getting itchier with ever passing moment. He somehow knew that stopping to talk to Dominic had been a bad idea, and he ached to just start swinging. Something about Dominic's talking stopped him though, the brazen confidence of it all forcing him to smell the waiting trap.

"Oh, well, I think you'll all be quite reluctant to attack when I show you the little surprise I cooked up on the way here!" he said, mania once again edging his shrill voice. Tapping his huge subordinate on the shoulder, he signaled the brute, causing him to reach around to something behind his back, apparently strapped just below Dominic's perch. When he brought his hand back around, there was a collective gasp from the heroes. "Ah yes, I caught this little mouse sticking her nose where it didn't belong. After having a little fun with her, I decided she'd make excellent leverage to keep you scum in line after you scrapped those old junkers I foddered into your ambush."

The vicious ooze of Dominic's words fairly dripped from his tongue, his eyes crazy wide as he watched the looks of horror and disgust scratch across their faces. Held securely in Masonstone's crushing grip was a battered and beaten woman, probably no older than fifteen, though one couldn't really tell through the bruises and dried blood on her face. The tattered remains of a once brilliant blue robe showed her to be a priestess of Azar, probably captured while spying out their position. It was also probably why there'd been no warning of this impending attack.

"DOMINIC—YOU SHIT EATING WORM! RELEASE HER!" shrieked Raven, her whole body exploding with her power as the nausea at what her former sister must have been through mutated into burning fury that made her earlier snit with Caspar look like a child's tea party.

"Calm down little birdie, or your dear sister priestess will join her deity—oh wait, now that I've defiled her, she can't can she? HAHAHHAHAHAHA!" Despite his taunting, Raven managed to reign in her anger, reducing her flare of hate to a subtle burn in a disturbingly short time. As it turned out, she only managed it by... _redirection_.

"Do you really think you will get away with your vile and unforgivable acts of disgustingness?" asked Starfire quietly, her eyes cast down and away from the battered girl that dangled like a dead thing in Masonstone's big hand. There was a frail quality to her voice that Dominic couldn't resist, drool slowly dripping down his chin as he gave himself even further to his madness of lust and violence.

"My dear little slut, why should I possibly think I wouldn't?" he asked, a fierce desire burning in his body for the bitch that had wounded him, taking his right hand forever. To his surprise, she quietly answered his rhetorical question.

"I was thinking perhaps you would find this convincing..." and her voice trailed off as she floated slowly toward him, eyes still concealed, as if she were too embarrassed by her current desperate act to look at him. Her magnificent braided hair slung over her shoulder and hung down across her scintillatingly form-fitting gilded armor, her hands clasped nervously behind her back as she inched ever closer through the air toward the young blond rapist. As though to cement the deal, small motions showed the bindings of her gilded-plate top slowly coming undone as she loosed the ties on her back, the stiff garment slipping enticingly loose about her shoulders and promising the unveiling of so much beautiful flesh. Dominic looked about ready to loose whatever shred of control he still possessed, foam gathering at the corner of his mouth as the woman he'd constantly desired to slowly cut to pieces for the past day was about to submit to him.

Starfire was soon right next to Masonstone, her bare midriff floating inches from his dull stare, Dominic's twitchingly excited from within easy arms reach, her compatriots looking on with abject horror. Slowly then, she placed one hand on either of Masonstone's monolithic shoulders, leaned forward, and looked up and into Dominic's bulging, bloodshot eyes. The flaming green pits that greeted him froze his quickened heart and curdled his breath in his lungs, choking down any order he might make to the clueless brute beneath them. In the next instant, Starfire's hands were two globs of molten stone where she was melting holes in Masonstone's body. The stupid living boulder dropped his hostage and swatted upward at his own squared head, hitting only his hideous face as Starfire flipped up to a handstand on his shoulders and opened up with beams from her burning hands. The burst of pressure threw him backward and ground his enormous bulk into the dry soil, pinning the scum pile on his back to the ground and probably doing all kinds of horrific damage to everything below his almost certainly shattered hips.

Raven wasted no time in taking her turn, the concentrated hate that she'd pressed hastily into the ground to save the priestess's life suddenly erupting back up again and enveloping the stone brute and his putrid companion in inky black energy that quickly concealed their prone forms. The blanket of black began to roil and quiver disgustingly, terrible bellows and screams of agony and fear making their way out of the dark shroud. The awful sounds and movements continued until the rage had run its course, Raven's emotions acting far independent from her will and taking revenge on the clear object of her hate, however momentary the initial feeling had been. When the darkness finally receded, there wasn't much left to do.

Both Masonstone and Dominic were still in one piece, Raven had managed that much control, but neither would be moving any time soon. Masonstone had huge black scars all over his hard body, scuffs and scratches that looked to have been made by some enormous claw raking up and down. Dominic was blackened and bloodied, as though he'd been beaten severely with clubs and stones, much as he richly deserved. As a final act however, Starfire made good on her earlier threats. Flying up, she landed hard, her left sandal digging into his left arm a few inches from his hand.

"I claim your _shnashpalps_," she said coldly, before flashing out with green fire from her eyes, flaying his hand away to nothing with three solid seconds of slow melting heat. As he screamed and writhed from where he was pinned under Masonstone, she finished, leaving only a smoking black stump. To silence his pathetic wails, she twisted around with a quick punt along his chin, snapping his head around and leaving him quiet on the ground, finally floating away from him.

As the others looked on with a new kind of amazement, stunned to silence by this utterly unexpected violence from their newest ally, Starfire pushed through them and fled the scene of that horrible experience, tears dripping from her eyes. Beast Boy moved to go after her, but Raven caught him by his ear and dragged him over to help her with the former prisoner, who'd lain still and silent since being dropped. Cyborg was caught in a major dilemma, wanting to comfort and thank Starfire for actions that had clearly saved them all, but truly having no earthly idea how.

They hadn't asked her to degrade herself like that, but then again, there was no way of knowing if Raven's subterranean attack would have been able to do the job by itself, so she might well have not even _had_ to, binding Cyborg up in all kinds of messed up concerns and giving him no clear path to comforting her. Unable to just stand there, he walked up and placed his huge metal hand on her slim shoulder, standing in powerful silent support as she wept in midair. Suddenly, she spun around and wrapped her arms around his neck, crying onto his cold metal shoulder and making him intensely uncomfortable as he placed a hand gently on her back in turn, taking the liberty of rebinding her chest plate before something truly embarrassing happened.

"I... I want to be with Robin..." she said quietly as she cried, her shame and shock from that encounter driving home a desire that had burned in her soul unabated since the ages and ages past when she'd found herself in this queer land. All her stress had focused into a hate for Dominic that truly frightened her, inspiring her violent vengeance and the ploy she'd used to implement it, something she'd never even momentarily considered in the past. Deception like that was normally beyond her, but like magic, her burning desire to cause pain to the sub-human trash before her had drawn out her deepest warrior instincts.

Death was no stranger to any Tamaranean, a race with a rich warrior tradition living on a harsh ice world surrounded by hostile aliens, she herself had seen it on many an occasion, but it was not something she'd ever remotely considered inflicting on another. As she'd stood over that... _creature_ now lying bloody and unconscious, crushed by his own tool of destruction, she had wanted to destroy him, to stick her hand into his chest and squeeze his heart till it burnt to a black ash as she'd once seen her combat instructor do to a Gordanian in a skirmish of her childhood. As it was, it took all her self-control not to break his neck rather than his jaw as she could so easily have done with that kick. He would live, though he would never walk, talk, or handle anything ever again, of course assuming Slade actually _let_ him live after his failure anyway. The grim reality of it all frightened her deeply, and tears were her only solace as she searched her soul for answers, wishing Robin were there to make it all clear to her as he always had in the past. It was Raven who finally snapped her out of her reverie then.

"Are you just going to cry there all day, or can we get a move on?" she asked heartlessly, the badly wounded girl cradled gently in a telekinetic gurney before her as she levitated calmly up the hill past Cyborg and Starfire. Beast Boy followed in tow, head down as he once again regretted not wasting Dominic's worthless hide when he'd had the chance, largely blaming himself for all the pain of the innocent (relatively, I mean, she had been spying, but _no_ _one_ deserves what she got) priestess and the seemingly inconsolable Starfire.

"Why do you say hurtful things?" moaned Starfire through her tears, far too gone to really be hurt by Raven's insensitivity, but none the less wondering at her snappishness.

"What I mean is, if we could get a move on here, there's still a good chance we can finish the ritual and get _out_ of here before Slade's main force arrives. Blubbering like that will neither help you feel better, nor save our lives, nor get Robin back from the Tower of Jump, so put a lid on the waterworks and let's get out of here." Raven's words were not vicious, but they were emotionless, her dull tone snapping out each syllable like it was a stiff metal bar, no softness or understanding whatsoever. She could be like that when in a certain mood. Cyborg almost said something, but decided he'd be better employed getting the woman on his neck back into the temple so they could get a return on all that junk they'd carted out here. Discussion stopped then as they all made their way inside, the promise of closing in on Robin quieting Starfire's tears, albeit slowly.

(On a side note, Cyborg did make a short side stop to fiddle with his carriage. Using the hand that wasn't comforting Starfire, he set up something he'd never really thought he'd have to use. When he left to enter the temple, it was with the knowledge that anyone who tried to mess with his ride and possibly copy the technology would be in for an _explosive_ surprise.)

Back in the Temple, an hour later

The priestesses, despite their rather fu-fu shopping list and less than admirable personalities, did have one thing to say for themselves: they didn't mess around in an emergency. The Abbess had gotten word of the battle rather easily (there were always eyes and ears everywhere there, after all) and had begun organizing the ritual Raven had asked for well before the heroes had finished their business with Dominic's advance force. By the time they'd gotten inside, there were already women trained in healing waiting to attend to them, though truly only the former prisoner was in bad enough shape to require any attention. The rest found comfortable chairs in one of the waiting rooms off of the antechamber, resting after their exertions, except for Raven, who walked off discretely at some point or another, presumably to work out whatever was necessary for her role in the mysterious 'ritual.' None talked, and an uncomfortable silence pervaded in the rather clammy room for some time, until Raven finally returned, fully an hour after their battle, and probably only an hour or so ahead of the rest of Slade's force (a 5mph march is easy for golems with enough crisym on hand).

"What's the word," asked Cyborg immediately, "Is this going down or what?"

"They'll be able to do it all right, but there've been a few alterations in the plan," responded Raven, crossing her arms and looking off at some random corner, body language expressing the annoyance her words didn't.

"LIKE _WHAT_?" and Cyborg was way past angry at this news. It was damn late for them to be pulling something like this.

"They say that since we've brought Slade to their door that we'll have to make arrangements for their protection before they'll chant a single spell to help us," and this time Raven's voice held distinct bitterness, the reasons she left the Azarath Order all glaring back up as perfectly justified in the face of their shortsighted foolishness.

"What do they want us to do?" asked Cyborg, rubbing his metal hand over his human eye in frustration, "We can barely protect ourselves and spring Robin, we can't leave anyone here that'd do a lick of good against the army Slade's set on our tail!"

"They know that. What they want instead is for me to use some of the power they're about to call down to move the Cathedral somewhere safer."

"NO! No way in hell! We were going to use that power to teleport into the Tower of Jump, we'll never break the magic barrier of the city without it! We can't spare any for them—it would defeat the whole purpose of calling it down in the first place!"

"It doesn't matter now," Raven said, her mask wilting slightly into unhappiness as she prepared to deliver what was clearly even worse news.

"And what exactly is that supposed to mean?"

"After I heard that Slade had upgraded his golems, I asked the temple seer to scry Jump City. The barrier's power has doubled from all earlier intelligence reports, even with every ounce of power the temple can call, I still wouldn't be able to break through it."

"GREAT! Just perfect! It's over! We're DONE," Cyborg raved in his rather overdramatic manner, leaping up from his chair and pacing back and forth across the small room with great pounding footsteps. As he complained, his arms flailed about, nearly breaking many pieces of furniture and barely missing Starfire and Beast Boy where they sat.

"_Calm__Down_," snapped Raven, the dull force of her voice slicing through his tantrum instantly. His arms dropped back to his sides as he stood to listen, so apparently it didn't take psychic vampirism for Raven to cool overheated emotions. In certain circumstances, her "ice" was more than enough.

"We can't get into Jump with the old plan, but we can still get ourselves and these...'allies' of ours out of here and away from the assured destruction marching here as we speak. I'm going to do it; we can think up a new plan after we've reached safety."

"Fine... whatever," mumbled Cyborg in defeat, falling hard onto the oak chair he'd been sitting in, causing serious cracking sounds that probably heralded its eventual destruction under his terrific weight. The quiet in the room after Raven left again was far worse than what had been before.

Defeat, a western peek in the Agony range, about 100 miles from where the temple used to be, roughly the same distance from Jump City.

The transfer had been subtle. From within the waiting room, the three comrades had noticed nothing. If they hadn't all been wrapped up in their own private dilemmas, they probably would have noticed the subtle flickering of shadows along the walls and the minute vibrations that shook the structure, disturbing chandeliers and beverages, but not much else. Raven's exertion was almost totally imperceptible from within the building, though not from without.

On the outside, Slade's skirmishing new model golems, who'd reached the crest of a far hill and gained a view of the distant temple, watched in automated indifference as a great shadow enveloped the enormous structure, black tendrils growing up out of the ground to cover every surface. When all that was left was a single pitch colored monolith, the whole thing wavered mystically, then spread enormous raven's wings and leapt upward into the sky. In a moment the shadow had morphed into a great bird and flew hundreds of feet into the air before vanishing in a swirling vortex of black. With a perfect reversal of this process, the temple reappeared at the same moment on a high crag of the Mountains of Agony, sheer cliffs falling off in every direction, the towers becoming a black cap to a white mountaintop.

As I said, the three heroes in the waiting room were far too occupied with their own problems to notice any of this, each moping in one or another state of misery. Cyborg was depressed over his general failure as de facto leader in Robin's absence, finding himself competing with the indomitable Raven far more often than Robin ever had. Beast Boy still hadn't stopped blaming himself for the misery of that Azar spy and Starfire at Dominic's now disintegrated hands. And Starfire... well... for a while there was that whole thing with Robin and the fact that she felt the need for a month-long hot shower after dealing with Dominic, but as of right now, Caspar was distracting her from all that, not at all an unwelcome happening.

"_So boss, I just got another communication from Skye. Apparently he wants to know if you've been feeling any different over the past few moments_."

"Why is that?" she asked him out loud, glad to be distracted from her dark thoughts and eager to know of any word from the real world. Her talking went initially unnoticed by the other two mopes.

"_Apparently the real world version of Miss Raven just used her healing powers on you, so technically, some kind of obstacle should have been removed or some great power introduced to the world._"

"I feel no different..." she trailed off, wondering momentarily about great powers being injected into this world from the sky.

"_Incidentally, your scry sphere just reported that we've undergone a massive special transfer, and are now some one hundred miles from where we were a few moments ago. Just FYI._"

"Truly?" she burst out, jumping up in excitement and forgetting her half-formed theory about coincidences of power-calling and power-injecting by spirit/real world counterparts of her most magical friend. Her outburst finally attracted the attention of the guys, who she quickly relayed Caspar's insight to. It was unanimously agreed to check out the front door, and they rushed into the antechamber and up to the huge, barred doors that lead to the outside. Cyborg quickly opened it and pushed outward, meeting a wall of icy wind and an endless grey expanse before him, as well as a sudden lack of something beneath the foot he'd hastily stuck out the door.

When Starfire had melted him out of the twenty-foot snow drift he'd sunk into and dragged him through the air up the huge cliff that the door now opened out over, the two of them collapsed back into the warmth, Beast Boy slamming the doors shut behind them and cutting off the bone-chilling wind. When they finally looked up again, a haggard looking Raven stood over them, staring down with a tired exasperation on her usually blank face. Seeing her triumphant friend, Starfire threw off Cyborg's enormous dead weight like he was a huge steel feather and flew into an upright hover in the blink of an eye.

"Friend Raven—you did it!" she shouted, smiling brilliantly and seeking to sweep Raven up into a warm congratulatory embrace. The tired woman found herself completely unable to evade, barely managing to raise an arm as she saw a wave of unwanted affection sweeping toward her, unstoppable as a tsunami and twice as unpleasant (in her eyes anyway). As she endured the rib-cracking pressure (Starfire had had little excuse to hug recently, and was putting a bit more into it than usual), Raven couldn't help but be slightly comforted, especially as the pain and contagious enthusiasm revived her somewhat after her exertions.

"So you did it... great," broke in Cyborg with little enthusiasm. "How much of the power they called down from the goddess is left?" Raven waited to answer until she'd gotten her breath back after the hug, even then silently answering by reaching into the deep sleeve of her robe and pulling out a small black object.

It was a gem, black as obsidian and yet somehow transparent at the same time. The outer shell was a perfect cube, and within was the ghostly white outline of a sphere, also translucent, so that the lines of Raven's palm were visible through it. It seemed to emanate a warm power, comforting to the body much as a blanket and a hot drink, easing the aches of the tired group even as it sat in her hand. All were immediately struck by its similarity to another mysterious gemstone, and Starfire acted to pursue this train of thought before anyone else could even begin to suggest it.

Reaching behind her back, she pulled at her braid for a moment, lifting and fiddling with it until she'd yanked something free of its innards. When she brought her hands back around, they held the wonderful glowing sphere that had appeared in her hand the previous night. No sooner did she hold it out in front of her than the two reacted, each somehow sensing the other's presence and immediately showing the nature of these two energy repositories. With a swirling flash of light from each, an incredible attractive force began between the two palm-sized gems, yanking the one right out of Raven's unprepared grasp and sucking it through the air.

A lighting grab by Starfire covered her own gem before the two could collide, but the other still smacked painfully into her closed hand, causing her to cry out and grab at the hard cube. Despite yanking with all her strength, she could not budge the gem from where it was pinned to her flesh, and the two shapes were quickly crushing her hand even as she ripped at it. Even as Cyborg grabbed Raven's gem and Starfire gripped at her own they could barely manage a single inch of give between them, though this was enough to save Starfire's hand from bloody compression at least.

"Raven... please tell us... what to do with these?" Starfire asked as she leaned back with all the power of her muscle and flight ability behind her pull on her spherical gem.

"And make it quick—urggg!—I can't hold onto this thing all day!" appended Cyborg through clenched teeth, every ounce of his immense weight leaning back on the black cube he'd wrapped his own hand around. Still his hand brushed against Starfire's, and even as they appealed to Raven for help, their knuckles began to press together as their pulling gave way to the fabulous attraction between the black and white-silver stones.

"The inherent natures of the two powerstones must be exactly opposite. The force of their attracting indicates that they're stupendously reactive to one another. I... I don't know... what would happen..." Raven trailed off, eyes wide with unusual fear as she watched the power of her goddess and that of the mysterious Skye grow closer and closer despite what must have been thousands of pounds of force generated by two super-humans pulling them apart.

"How could you not _know_?" asked a panicky Beast Boy, who knew not how he could help his friends keep the stones apart without unbalancing the equilibrium they'd reached and pulling the whole bunch of them over. "I mean, where did your gem-thingy even come from?"

"It was the leftovers from what the priestesses called down from Raven," answered Raven out of hand, prompting a spectacular panic/confusion flip in Beast Boy's expression.

"They called it down... from you?" he asked stupidly.

"Blasphemer!" snapped Raven, smacking Beast Boy hard enough to put him on his butt. "They called it down from the _goddess_ Raven, greatest aspect of Azar, whom I'm _named_ for."

"HELLOOO? _We're in some trouble here_!" reminded Cyborg frantically as Starfire began to squeal softly from the sensation of her gem grinding her fist into the hard steel of Cyborg's gauntlet-hands. The sound snapped through Raven's indecision instantly, and she made an extremely fateful choice the next moment.

"Let go!" she shouted, and the two struggling, super-strong warriors gladly complied, each releasing their load at the same instant, their hands pinching together as they barely managed to get them out of the way of the two irresistibly attracted energies. The gems snapped together with a sound like one pain of wet glass striking another, sticking fast in the air end to end and floating freely and serenely for a long moment. The pause was just long enough for everyone to _assume_ that nothing was going to happen.

Even as Raven reached out to grasp the floating gems, they began to change, the two of them wavering and shifting before their very eyes, emitting another series of swirling flashes before beginning to integrate into one another. Like two globs of jelly, the shapes melted together, fitting into one another like a three-dimensional peg-and-slot set. In the next moment, the starburst within the silver sphere was perfectly within the sphere within the black cube, which was perfectly within the outer silver sphere in turn, the resulting compound of inscribed shapes forming a single perfect superstructure. As a last act, the melded colors found the happy medium between the white and black energies, taking on a grey tinge that slowly blanked out everything inside and left only the glass-smooth spherical shell visible. That done, the orb fell calmly to the ground, clinking against the stone floor a few times before rolling to as stop an inch from Raven's feet.

"...Power..." said Raven softly, after a long moment of staring down her robes at the grey ball. The others looked on in confusion, unable to see what she saw, and more than a little worried by the indescribable expression on her face. "So much power... it's... I... _wow_."

"Are you okay Raven?" asked Cyborg as he pulled himself from the floor. He walked over and gave Starfire a hand too, then Beast Boy a moment later, and all three of them walked up to stand around Raven and try to figure out what was going on with her.

"You guys..." Raven began absently, as she leaned over and got a closer look at the grey orb, "what would you say if I told you we could end the war today? Right now?"

"I'd ask you if they made you smoke something during that magic spell back there, because there's no way in hell we can end the war all by ourselves," said Cyborg in annoyance, waving a hand in front of Raven's eyes and getting no response, her vision locked on the orb. Without warning, she gasped, snapping up the orb and springing to full height again.

"Quickly—the power is dissipating! Everyone grab onto me, this is going to be one hell of a ride!" she shouted, using her powers to draw all the others up next to her before doing something inscrutable to the ball in her hand. The next moment, everyone felt an incredible sensation, then there was only the grey fog.

The Sky, near the dimensional ceiling, an imperceptible fraction of an instant later

Caspar, the moment he felt the infusion of power they all received from the orb, took a moment to try and analyze the energy. Through some disgusting violation of time-space mechanics, his attempt to examine the energy interfered with Raven's hasty (but still expertly done) teleportation, and the next thing he knew, he was staring down at an endless expanse of countryside, everything frozen in a relief of black and white. The world around his perceptions (which had full color detection from years of working with creatures that defined their world by visible light) was cast in a perfect monochrome, everything a perfect white or black, none of that 'shades of gray' stuff you'd get with old TV shows.

As he looked on in idle curiosity at the odd phenomenon he was experiencing, he noticed the world around him was changing slightly every second. Like examining a reel of film one frame at a time, the landscape moved by in huge jerks that must have covered hundreds of feet each. They seemed to be traveling northeast, though for this he had to trust the questionable readout given by Starfire's still active scry sphere. He really didn't know whether or not to believe that they were going .8 times the speed of light, though when trying to calculate instantaneous velocity of teleportation, he really couldn't blame the mystical tool for it's trouble. Of more concern than this in his mind was the fact that the current objective it was pointing toward was changing randomly and wildly with every flash of movement they experienced, as though fate itself was being twisted around and around by the energies they had let loose upon Starfire's soul, and thus this world.

After some time of puzzling over this, the spastic alteration of objectives slowed to a stop, every flash of movement driving them closer to one final point that would not change, apparently located in the exact direction that they were going. Deducing quickly, he figured the point to be the Tower of Jump, and of course, it didn't take a detective to guess what this final objective would be. Finding himself in the sudden position of having succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations of how long it would take to rouse Starfire (he guessed—there was absolutely no correlation of time between this world and the real one, but he could safely assume that a few days here would be much less than a half-month there), Caspar mentally kicked back and enjoyed the rest of his ride.

He didn't concern himself over why it was that he could perceive anything while he was supposed to be instantly appearing at another point in space, nor about why there was such a spectacular reaction between the energy of Skye and Raven. Those were questions for people who cared. All he need know was that his job was almost done, and then he could enjoy some well-deserved hibernation until Skye retrieved him. Of course, it was around then that the signal on the scry sphere began acting a little funny, and Caspar had only just begun to try and figure out that one (it was actually relevant to him, after all) when everything changed _again_.

Tower of Jump, Top Floor Observation Room, effectively the same moment that they left the Temple

With a flash of gray, the quartet of heroes suddenly found themselves in the covered crown of a huge tower, the view below consumed by an enormous city, what sky they could see tinged orange by crisym-driven magic. Raven, who'd been standing perfectly in the center of the other three, collapsed suddenly into a heap, drawing the attention of her confused comrades away from their sudden displacement. When they bent down to check on her, they were variously stunned and shocked by her condition.

Raven had turned gray. Every inch of her body and robes, rather than their normal color, was instead the same unforgiving and lifeless gray that had embodied the gems after their combination. The coloring was so complete that details of her form were indistinct, the all-encompassing color making every part of her blend into a single gray lump, only the play of shadows from the tower's torchlight giving her any definition at all. As they stared on in shock, she mumbled incoherently about power, about how it had been a limitless as it was uncontrollable, and about how there should have been more. Her rambling voice mumbled on and on, even as Cyborg gently lifted her from the cold stone and held her pristinely monochrome body close to his chest.

With a gasp, Starfire looked down at the mark of Caspar on her arm, seeming to listen to something the others couldn't hear. Nodding slowly, she held her hand out toward Raven, keeping her palm pointing steadily at Cyborg's sad burden for a long quiet moment. Suddenly, she sighed in relief and smiled slightly to the others, relaying to them Caspar's assurances that Raven would recover with time.

"What happened to her? I figure she used that gray orb's power to bring us here, but why did it do this to her?" asked Cyborg as he examined the dull shine her flesh had taken on. After a moment of silence, Starfire nodded a few more times, then answered him.

"Caspar says that bringing us here wasn't supposed to be possible, and that by using 'godly' power to do it, Raven altered all of our fates. He says that the power in the orb was huge, but that all of it was used up in getting here because, for fate to change, thousands of events that we should have experienced and been effected by had to be compensated for with energy. The strain had... '_consequences'_ he says," and Starfire frowned slightly, ignoring the mystified expressions Beast Boy and Cyborg now wore. There was evidently another exchange between her and her spirit guide, because her next actions had no other possible explanation.

"NO!" she shouted, green fire blazing up in her eyes and hands, "I will _not_ allow that to happen," and she turned from the others without another word, flying over the ledge of the tower and zipping away from her allies without paying them further mind.

(Starfire/Caspar)

"_... so you could be out of here in the next five minutes, but we have to hurry. Robin's signature is flickering, the forces of destiny are in spectacular flux after that stunt Raven pulled, and this could still go either way. At least, you'll be out of here any moment no matter what, but if you don't get down there, there's no telling what will happen to Robin before we go._"

"He will come to _no_ _harm_ while I still draw breath," Starfire snapped at her passenger as she flew downward in a power dive. The next instant, Caspar directed her to stop, and she vaporized the wall of the tower to gain entrance to the desired floor. Peering into the dark room, she saw nothing but a door and a shabby, full-size mirror. Caspar directed her again, and she flew through the mirror at high speed, never questioning his guidance. The next moment, she was in an even darker room, a similar mirror to the old one behind her, her green fury the only thing to light her way as he directed her through a series of catacombs.

"_I didn't expect this to come so soon, but I still have to explain a few things to you,_" said Caspar as they barreled down a long dark hallway.

"Then do so—_quickly_."

"_First off, when you come to, you're going to feel like no time has passed since you went under. You'll open your eyes expecting to be in downtown Jump, knowing nothing of the time you spent here._" Caspar felt Starfire's emotions lurch, but she said nothing, and he continued to direct her through a labyrinth of turns and twists, the green light off her hands casting creeping shadows as she flew as best she could along the tortuous path.

"_I know you won't ask, so I'll just answer. At no time in your waking life will you remember the places, friends, enemies, or experiences you have had here as anything more than a shadowy _de jeah vou_. Before you let this thought get to you--take a left here--know that this is your dream world now, and possibly forever. You'll be back here again, perhaps every night, to a world picked for you at random and tied to your soul until further notice. So chill, it'll all work out._" He felt her anxiety loosen somewhat, and he ordered her through one huge wooden door among hundreds that lined either side of the long hall they'd come to. Finding it locked, she incinerated the old wood like so much tissue paper under her hands and flew on.

"_Second, I won't be able to talk to you anymore once you come to. As a matter of fact, no one is to know that I am with you. I will be in deep hibernation, invisible to all but the most exacting examination of your soul, waiting to be picked up by Skye. While I won't be jabbering away, my presence will still intensify your powers noticeably. I'm just saying, be careful with all that extra energy, I know you hold back to keep from mutilating and killing with your starbolts, and I wouldn't want you to think you're loosing control of your powers. Heh, listen to me, talking as if you'll remember this—I guess I just hope some flash memory of it will comfort you if you get worried. Hold up... we're here._"

They were stopped in front of a door that looked like any of the others: heavy, wooden, and smelling faintly of wet rot. Starfire was still trying to come to terms with loosing her revelation of fully requited love for Robin, not even touching upon all the new/old friends she'd met and fought together with, and only her complete resolve allowed her to pull her mind away from such unpleasant thoughts and look toward this last act of her forced presence in this world (though far from her last act as a dream visitor, which she would be upon her return). Reaching toward the door to blast it away as she had all the others, she found her hand suddenly locked in place, Caspar snapping a warning into her mind at the same time.

"_The door is shielded—dangerously so. Hold on while I check it out, if you're killed here, you could still become trapped in spirit limbo, even though Raven cleared the path for your recovery. ... Okay, I've analyzed it, and it's quite impervious to anything we can bring to bear, though our target is definitely just beyond it._"

"We _must_ get in, I will have only nightmares here if I return and Robin has suffered some terrible fate," she said, the glow in her eyes flaring as she prepared to take her best shot at the door.

"_Boss, please, think a moment. Fantasy worlds like this are so 'inside the box' it's actually kind of funny. The door is shielded to all get out, but the wall around it... well... it's just stone. If you would please?_"

"Of course," and Starfire smiled brilliantly as spheres of green energy built up around her palms. "Friend Caspar, I truly admire the way you think," she sincerely complimented as she moved her hands along the wall in the shape of a small arch. In seconds, she'd melted a secure portal through the foot-thick stone, the molten remains pooling on the floor as they hissed and gurgled away. The next moment, Starfire stepped in, ready for anything. She was bathed in heat, and by the faint, all-pervading red glow, she was granted a vision out of nightmares.

All along the walls of this huge, smoky, smelly room were hanging... _things_. Pale, dirty, softly moaning figures all tied up, strapped to various metal implements, covered alternately with blood, grime, and their own stinking excrement. Starfire's mind reeled, her stomach lurched, and she felt her psyche begin to slip as her eyes struggled to comprehend to abject horror of what they were seeing, even as a soul-chilling voice whispered that any one of the unrecognizable creatures on the walls could be her love. A quick intervention by Caspar prevented her mind from disintegrating at the mere suggestion, and he managed to block out most of her nausea and brain-freezing shock as he assured her that Kitten would want Robin in better condition than what these poor bastards had gotten.

Using that assumption as an anchor, she flew quickly to the end of the room, looking neither right nor left for fear of what was making those pitiful noises all around her. Even this didn't protect her from the smell of burnt meat that came from the metal cages hanging suspended over the pits of hot coals that dominated the center of the room, but at least she could pretended the contents of the cages were dead... they didn't move. She came at last to another door, the first metal door she'd seen since she entered the pit beneath the tower. As she approached, she could hear voices, and she compulsively stopped to eavesdrop.

"So Robie-pooh, I'll ask you one last time," spoke a gratingly familiar voice, and Starfire felt fury displace nausea at the first sugary-sweet lightings of the voice who's very tone was a vicious lie. "There are no guards, no golems, just you (pointed pause) and me. So, tell me that you love me, that you'll be my devoted concubine and attendant for the rest of your days, and you won't have to join all my other little projects out in the gallery room. I know how to bring your exquisite pleasure (sickening pause)... _or_ _excruciating_ _agony_!" and there was a sharp crack and a grunt of pain from a voice that Starfire recognized as she would her own reflection.

(Robin)

The sting of yet another welt across his bare chest choked a pained sound out of Robin's hoarse throat. Lack of water had cracked his lips and parched his throat; lack of food had emaciated his flesh and forced his taught muscles into sharp relief all over his body as what little fat he'd had was eaten away by starvation. Dripping or dried blood, matted _grime a la dungeon_ (pardon my 'French'), and week-old sweat coated his body, stinging in the plethora of wounds he'd gathered since his arrival in this hell-pit.

His capture had been quick and dirty, a drugged drink, a swirl of blackness, then a slow wake-up to a splitting headache, a lack of anything but some loose pants (not his own) and his mask, and the illustrious Empress Kitten just about rubbing herself all over him. When his persistent evasions of her advances (despite _very_ heavy chains) finally convinced Kitten he wasn't going to be seduced, he was immediately remanded to the home of her less... "public" hobbies. Without the various tools he'd concealed about his combat gear (which they'd stripped him of, probably realizing they'd never find everything he'd hidden) he had precious little chance of escaping, so far hoping that the splinter he'd been relentlessly working out of his chair for the past eight days would finally come loose.

The mahogany chair he was chained to was in turn bolted to the floor, the bonds on his ankles and around his waist keeping him from using his weight to tilt or break the sturdy wood. It also left him with just barely enough room to go to the bathroom in a rusty bead pan with the help of a deaf, hunchback, eunuch, manservant that Kitten kept around down here. Not that there'd been much to that since they'd cut his rations down to two cups of fetid water a day last week. All in all, Robin was floating in a nebulous area somewhere between utter, bone-gnawing exhaustion and a homicidal fury that he could barely contain.

And yet, contain it he did. He'd been silent for ten days straight, nearly the entire period of his stay in the torture pit. After the unceasing stream of stinging back talk he'd given Kitten upon his arrival in her "play room" despite her numerous attempts to silence him (she lacked the strength to break his jaw, and would allow no one else to strike his face) she'd brought in a golem and programmed it to kill Gotham POWs (that Kitten had kept "hanging around" for just such an opportunity) whenever he said anything. Two of his comrades had bought it before he realized just how serious this fucking head-trip of a bitch really was.

The sting finished snapping through his fatigued brain and his reverie was broken, Kitten's eyes flashing lustily from behind the porcelain cat mask she wore. As usual, she wore a skin-tight leather number that was supposed to be titillating, all straps and buckles and holes in just the right places, probably intending it as another form of torture for the (exclusively male) prisoners she kept down here, paradise out of reach or some such. To Robin, it was just a sight that would have made him want to puke if he'd had anything at all in his stomach just then. Big, meaningless, evil lies like the coating of beauty on Kitten's hideous soul always made him sick.

"Well, Robie-pooh, do you have my answer?" she asked in a terminally sugarcoated tone, trying to mimic the sound of an actually innocent girl—and doing a frighteningly good job.

He had her answer all right. It had taken him two days to save up, and at least one of his soldiers would die in retaliation, but they knew the job was dangerous when they took it, and they would be helping him strike a blow for freedom. As she leaned over him so close he could smell the slight difference between her body powder and her perfume scent, Robin sopped up his missile of choice from every corner of his mouth. It was mostly the remains of his last water ration, but there was a good deal of dirt, blood, and good old snot in the mix too, and he took careful aim with his single shot as Kitten waited for his response.

It struck her directly in her freely open cleavage, dripping downward rapidly and getting under the leather of her slut outfit. Her leaping-screaming-flailing flinch of abject disgust/rage was a sight to behold, days of helpless endurance rewarded in one shining instant of victory. As she rushed to wipe it away, he only wished he could see her face under the white mask, sure that her expression would be worth two days on the wrack or a session with thumbscrews. She came back at him suddenly, brandishing her barbed riding crop in speechless fury before finally finding her voice.

"YOU LITTLE SHIT! _I will flay the flesh from your ungrateful bones_!" The crazy eyes showing through the mask made him believe it, and he braced himself for another long pummeling, still sure that he'd won a round in the battle against his captor. She was just bringing back the crop to make good on her promise when a sudden sound shocked the both of them. It came from the door, and sure enough, a repeat sound prompted the foot thick iron monstrosity of an obstruction to dent deeply and fling open on its cracked hinges. A figure was silhouetted in the light of the coal pit outside, a sinuous profile with glowing green eyes and orbs of crackling energy around its hands.

"_You will do no such thing!_" shouted a slightly foreign-sounding female voice, menace dripping from every syllable as Robin and Kitten looked on in shock. The green eyes turned to gaze at Robin by the flickering torchlight and a gasp of disbelief and heartbreak sailed from the woman, stopping her rampage before it began. As he looked on in silent shock at this stranger, he realized rather detachedly that he must look quite the mess. He dared not hope of rescue, and watched in confusion as the woman walked slowly toward them, her beautiful features slowly revealed as she approached the light. She was able to come right up next to them before Kitten got over her own surprise.

"WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?" she shrieked at the stranger, flicking her crop in anger and preparing to summon guards with a magic communicator in the handle. In a flash of green that Robin's tired mind couldn't hope to follow, Kitten was suddenly not standing where she had been a moment before.

There was a flash, a rush of air, a shattering of porcelain, then a short delay before a dull thump signified Kitten's impact with the far wall of the cell. The stranger's arm was in full extension after a backhand slap that had effectively silenced Kitten more surely than any Robin could have meted out (he would have held back on the girl, no matter how much he hated her evil guts, but the stranger... well... _didn't_). Robin caught the edge of a predatory glare from the stranger's glowing eyes that seemed to say, "I'll deal with you later," to Kitten's unmoving body, but then she was all over him, and he had little chance to wonder at such concentrated hate in a single glare.

"Robin, please, what is your condition? Are you 'okay?' What did that _estrogln_ _bitch_-_whore_ do to you?" and the panicked concern in her voice was finally enough to break through the fog on his brain and make him realize that, yes, he _was_ being rescued. First things first then.

"_Water_..." he managed to croak out of a mouth rougher than sandpaper and fried chicken breading combined. The stranger leapt back and glanced around the room frantically, finally spotting the pitcher of ice water Kitten had brought down to dangle in front of Robin's parched lips. Flying over, she grabbed it up and rushed back. Seeing the heavy chains that bound him to the chair so tightly that they'd dug red pits into his skin, she was sidetracked by outrage, using one glowing hand to shatter the wood of the chair's back and free his chained hands and waist. Robin himself twisted his arms out from behind his back with an impressive demonstration of his double-jointed shoulders, getting his chains up front and finally obtaining enough leverage to break the chair's seat, lifting his chained legs off the still upright legs where they were attached to the floor.

That taken care of, he wasted no time in snatching the water pitcher out of her hand. The first mouth full washed away a half-month of blood and grime, his quick spit into one fetid corner of the cell coming out as a red and black mess. The rest was downed in a series of deep gulps, Robin ignoring the protests of his stomach to the unfamiliar condition of being filled, reveling in the cool sensation running down his throat. When he'd drained the whole tank, he keeled over onto his knees, flinging the crystal container away to its immediate destruction upon the hard stone. Breathing heavily, he looked down at the chains dangling from his wrists and wondered at this completely unexpected set of circumstances.

(Starfire/Robin)

"_I'd give it about... one minute till we're out of here_." Caspar spoke into her mind as Robin gathered himself on the floor.

"But will I not be back?" she asked him softly, barely hearing him through a veil of concern for Robin. He'd been chewed up further than she'd ever seen him, beaten black, blue, red, orange, purple, and several shades of green (healing bruises and festering cuts can do that). His usually spiky hair was matted and tangled with dried blood and layers of dirt, and there didn't seem to be any inch of his muscle-engraved body not in some way marred with injury.

"_Sure, I guess. The thing is, I don't know WHEN you'll be back. The way worlds like this work, it could be a hundred years of time here before you dream your way back again, so you may have to track down the distant grandchildren of everyone you've met so far. Then again, you could be dropped back into the exact moment you leave. These things are weird like that." _

"When I leave, I will forget that Robin and I love one another, and will once again be controlled by fear that he will reject me as a friend and a lover should I tell him of my feelings," she whispered to herself, eyes cast down as indecision ate at her.

"_Forty five seconds._"

A sudden resolve gripped Starfire's heart, a decision made and locked into her chest, and she quickly leaned down next to Robin and lifted his chin to have him look her in the eyes. When his eyes looked back at her from behind his grimy black mask, a connection was made. Sudden and deep, Robin's question of who she was died on his lips as he was drawn irresistibly into two endless pools of sparkling green. His heart fluttered unexpectedly, he broke out in a sweat, and he found himself at a sudden and complete loss for words for the first time in his entire life. Sometimes the soul knows what the mind does not, and Robin's soul (the facsimile in this world was quite perfect) would always know its true match when meeting eyes allowed the mated spirits to touch. They drank in each other's eyes for a long moment of silent ecstasy.

"_Twenty seconds,_" urged Caspar politely, and Starfire took the warning to heart, closing her eyes and leaning forward slowly. Robin felt himself drawn in by a force that far surpassed his caution, his curiosity, _and_ his determination, his own eyes closing as his lips approached those so enticingly offered. They met.

The heat spread quickly from the point of soft contact to every part of their suddenly linked bodies. Instantly something inside each of them melted, a sensation in the pit of the stomach like warm chocolate dripping into a runny mess. A blush crept along Starfire's arms and neck, her heart beating faster and faster as every nerve in her body burned with a passionate heat. Robin felt like two million gold crowns, every ache and pain forgotten in a wash of soothing pleasure that rushed through his body like a summer breeze. The two burned brightly for a long moment of shared heat, pleasure freely flowing between them from their joined lips.

"_3, 2, 1_..._Blastoff_," was the last thing Starfire heard before she opened her eyes. There was a fog, and then a light, then she opened her eyes a second time. Her real eyes.

Preview: God, wasn't that great? I know I enjoyed the hell out of writing it, so hopefully you liked it too. I left the plot open for return (much, much shorter) visits to Starfire's dream world, just because I got such a kick out of the bubblegum fantasy/technomancy genre. Anyway, the next chapter will be a descriptive one, with the confessions part of my awakenings and confessions chapter finally coming back after the long hiatus. Skye will speak long and eloquently of many things in his attempt to gain the trust of those his powers draw him to as essential for survival. Everyone else will get more than they bargained for out of the stranger that showed up and pulled their fat out of the fire. In any case, there will be more confessions than just out of Skye, ones interesting for far different reasons, so don't miss: Awakenings and Confessions—Part II


	13. Awakenings and Confessions Part 2

Intro: Another long absence, but well worth it. Those with no interest in the psychic abilities portions of my story so far should feel free to skip down to the end, which is quite a steamy little romance scene between everyone's favorite couple (the confessions part of these chapters, actually). Of course, such people would miss the unfolding dynamics between Skye and Raven (as magnificently foul as those are shaping up to be) and some mild humor as Skye gives the equivalent of a psychic power point presentation. Also of note is my continuing attempt to reconcile the classic Titans backstories with the more PC cartoon versions that the animated series introduced. Anyway, read on!   
Awakenings and Confessions—Part II 

When we last left Titans Tower, our heroes were rushing into Starfire's med-bay room to be present for her unexpected awakening. For no reason that they could comprehend, Skye sensed her regaining consciousness days ahead of the most optimistic predictions, even considering a healing job from both Raven and Skye.

Titans Tower Med-bay, Starfire's Room

"Hey Cy, is it just me, or does she look a little flushed?" asked Beast Boy as he leaned against the edge of her bed and looked to see if there was any sign of her coming to.

"I don't know man—and back up some! I know the last thing she wants to see when she wakes up is your ugly green mug three inches from her face." The metal man was on the opposite side of the bed, taking up a large portion of that side of the room that hadn't already been filled with get-well gifts.

The room was pungent from the dozens upon dozens of flowers, even considering all those that had been blown to bits when Skye and Raven had had their little scuffle in here. In fact, the room had been rather ill-treated over the last twenty four hours, with a blood stain on the floor from Robin, a missing wall panel from Raven, and potting soil in the tiles where they'd yet to finish cleaning after Skye stopped those projectiles in midair. As it was, the doctors had been considering moving her elsewhere, but hadn't really had time to do more than tidy up her current space a little.

Beast Boy was giving Cyborg a particularly nasty look when Robin, Skye, and Raven entered the room together, the chair-bound acrobat looking much worse for wear than he had before pigheadedly insisting on moving so soon after surgery. For that matter, the mismatched light and dark figures behind him had some seriously unpleasant expressions of their own, and looked for all the world like they were each pretending the other wasn't there.

As they came into the room then, Skye wheeled Robin up to where Beast Boy was standing, stopping just in front of him and giving him a _look_. A stare that was quickly reproduced by all the others, each of them glaring at the green one as he remained exactly where he'd been, in the perfect spot for seeing Starfire awaken. Unable to remain oblivious under that much concentrated disapproval, he got a nervous expression and asked, "_What_?"

"C'mon man, let Robin have that spot, the guy's in a wheelchair for cryin out loud!" snapped Cyborg, usually the one to deal with Beast Boy's cluelessness (if not Raven).

"Hey, he can get his own spot! I got here first, I get first pick on spots, that's how it works!" shouted the changeling, swinging his arms around for emphasis. The stony silence that followed pretty well told him that he had no support whatsoever on the "first come first serve" claim he'd invoked, and he reluctantly vacated his spot, muttering all the way. "Sure, _always_ pick on the _green_ one... no one ever asks _Cyborg_ to give up _his_ spot... I oughtta get _myself_ busted up a little, get some VIP treatment around here..."

That little dispute done with, Robin was quickly placed in the choice position next to Starfire, where he promptly took up her hand and sat much as he had the night before. The startling similarity was lost on neither him nor Skye, and both recalled memories of the particular spectacle that had taken place a surprisingly short time ago. Robin cast his mind back to what he thought were near-death hallucinations, the shadow of that absolute certainty of his and Star's mutual affection haunting his mind even now. Skye pulled his photographic memory of that moment, admiring once more the ultimately rare interaction of harmonic souls, taking in every ebb and flow of sparkling spiritual energy that that instant had painted across the ether. A stirring in the object of their contemplation broke the mutual reverie of the two young men then, the young woman on the bed groaning softly and moving fitfully where she lay.

"I still don't get it," wondered Skye out loud as he stood just to the side of Robin and looked down on the woman he'd just finished healing an hour ago. He'd set her up to regenerate almost insurmountable spiritual and nervous damage over the course of something like a month, hoping that her tissue damage wouldn't kill her in the meantime. Raven had pretty well covered that contingency, and had moved her ETA to something like a week, but even now Skye could feel that she was projecting classic mental reinitialization energy. A quick glaze over her physical status showed that she still had all kinds of damage everywhere, but she was coming to, and there simply was no explanation. Yet.

With the stirring then came something else, a kind of flavor to her energy that Skye could not help but notice. His senses showed her gorgeous aura taking on a spectacular gray tinge, and from sounds of amazement all around him, it wasn't just her aura. His eyes weren't exactly suited to functioning by anything brighter than candle light, and he never really had much use for visible light anyway (clairvoyance is _so_ much better), but he was pretty sure her body itself was surrounded by a distinct gray glow too. As he focused his senses on her then, he watched with no small amazement as she went through weeks of recovery in a few seconds.

As he looked into her body, he could sense the tattered muscle and tissue in her stomach knitting back together, traumatized and punctured organs becoming whole, and even the complete regrowth of a bank of obliterated brain cells that had really been making Skye sweat earlier (neurons are _HARD_ to heal). Other of his senses detected her soul regenerating at a similarly stupendous rate, holes that he'd plugged with his own essence growing closed as her spirit responded to the irresistible impetuous of the gray energy that had infested her being. The flare of healing power was spectacular, but the brilliance was short-lived, and only seconds from its beginning, the light, both spectral and physical, died away to nothing. You could have cut the silence with a butter knife.

"Oooohhh," Starfire herself broke the oppressive quiet, stirring further until she'd made it quite clear that her body was no longer devoid of a guiding consciousness. After a long, heart-stopping moment of suspense, her eyes fluttered open...

(Starfire)

With a fluttering of her eyes, Starfire awoke to a vaguely familiar blank ceiling and no idea whatsoever where she was, what she'd been doing, or how she'd arrived on her back wherever it was that she was. After a moment of quiet panic, she gasped weekly and recalled a muddled image of fighting, explosions, and flying rock. There was a vivid memory of intense pain, then nothing, and she fought against rising terror as she clawed franticly at the confining sheets. She suddenly became aware of voices shouting and a heavy weight in her hand, her mind recoiling back to the present as her brain got used to the process of working again.

"Starfire!" a clear voice rang out, and her heart suddenly skipped two beats, all confusion driven from her mind by that oh so wonderful sound. Her eyes finished their frantic and sightless journey around the room to focus on the source of that voice, and the sudden appearance of her very favorite visage in the whole world brought a splendid pause to her panic.

"Robin," she managed to whisper weekly, gazing deeply into masked eyes that seemed to pull her in with their intense stare. She reveled in the warm compassion he pressed onto her with his eyes, forgetting countless discomforts of her own as a blush of happiness spread through her body. Suddenly however, her happiness was staggered by the state of her heart's desire.

A twinge around the eyes and a pale patina to his normally robust skin tone spoke of things she didn't care to think about, and concern filled her heart as a face that was currently her whole world was besmirched by unknown aches. Summoning her strength from where it lay sluggish and dormant within her, she awoke her numb arms and grasped at his hand with both of hers.

Looking ever deeper into his eyes, she asked simply, "Robin? ...Are you well? ... You seem... a little pale... perhaps... you should lie down?" Her voice failed her even as she tried to comfort him, and she blushed again, this time with embarrassment at her own weakness, even as she was heartened by the lift of amusement across his face. Finally, an explosion of laughter clued her in to the fact that something other than Robin existed in this world.

(Skye)

Skye allowed himself a discreet chuckle or two to accompany the raucous laughter that Starfire's comment had elicited from her relieved friends. The light show had been more than a little disconcerting, so hearing something so perfectly normal (for Starfire) released all kinds of subconscious stress in a very loud way. He watched in cool amusement as Cyborg struggled to breathe from where he was keeled over in the corner and Beast Boy pounded against the wall and began to tear up a little. He could sense nothing of Raven's mood, but a quick glance showed her grumpy expression had softened perceptibly. Robin projected a heated feeling of deeply loving concern and exceptional relief, continuing to quietly stare at Starfire as she gazed around the room in pleasant bewilderment, smile growing ever wider as she recognized all her friends. Her mind still wasn't working perfectly, new brain cells and physical exhaustion working together to keep her functioning at way below standard, but she was recovering from this too at an exponential rate, her body adjusting to its repaired state beautifully.

"Hey, Robin, you know you must look bad when someone who just came out of a coma thinks you should lie down!" commented Cyborg breathlessly from the corner. "Anyway, I kinda figure that question means she's feeling all right, but does someone mind telling me what the heck that weird light was? You guys said you'd used some healing powers on her but _damn_!"

Skye saw the question as the perfect cue to get back to work, so, taking a deep breath, he placed a hand on the frame of Star's bed and vaulted from Robin's side to Cyborg's side, seeking more room for his examination. Pretty well ignoring looks of confusion from all present, he proceeded to sharpen his senses and train them successively on everything from the status of her tissues and bones to the speed of electromagnetic impulses firing across her synapses. The odd glares he got were most likely because he had his shaded eyes barely a foot from her body as he swept his senses over her and catalogued her condition.

"What the hell are you doin' man?" asked Cyborg, who'd clearly been the most mystified by Skye's sudden change of position. Skye guessed from the aggression he was putting off that he didn't appreciate that a complete stranger had taken the liberty of leaning over Starfire and practically sticking his face to her, and that he was about ready to revoke all that he'd said in Skye's defense. All this he knew, but still, getting interrupted while he was concentrating on his senses really baked his cookie something terrible.

"What does it _look_ like I'm doing?" he snapped coolly at the huge presence behind him without bothering to move from his contested position.

"Do you really want me to answer that Mr. Attitude?" Cyborg snapped right back, crossing his arms over his chest as his face darkened with a seriously unpleasant glower. Skye could feel his discontent flowing out of him, wave after wave of threat screaming into Skye's mind, only intense concentration keeping him from loosing the last of the information he pulled out of her.

Now, normally, a person would be a little ticked at Cyborg after they way he nearly fucked over such a delicate operation, but Skye is not your average person. Once he was no longer deeply involved in use of his power, he realized that there was only one person in the room who could even possibly have the slightest clue what he was doing, and that he himself was totally in the wrong. Of course, though he knew it intellectually, this realization did little to calm him down. Fortunately, and as per normal for Skye, his intense anger had already faded to the utterly cool nothing he forever existed within.

"Sorry," he began calmly as he stood and turned back to the much larger man, a huge smile fixedly in place. He could read surprise in spades from the guy before him, apparently his shift from moody to pleasant had taken him off guard. From the rest of the room he sensed a stratum of silent interest in what could be learned from his actions with the big man, and with a start, Skye realized he'd been expertly baited. It was a test, only the still-staggered eyes of Starfire not hiding a heated curiosity for what he had to say now (though he actually had to guess on this for Raven, her mind as always projecting nothing from behind her sleek shield).

"I got a little snappish there because it was pretty delicate work," Skye continued, hoping no one noticed his split-second pause. "That kind of thing is hard to pull off when people are blasting their emotions on high gear right behind you, so I sort of overreacted when you started getting on my case there. Please let me apologize for getting testy, I really should have explained myself beforehand. Anyway, as for what I was doing, it'd be easier to show you. With permission from all of you, of course?" and the last was phrased as a question to the whole room.

"What do you mean, show us?" Cyborg shot back, clearly still point man for this latest dissection of Skye.

"I was using ESP to diagnose any side effects or possible causes related to that freaky light you just asked about. Rather than trying to explain it to you, I could just send what I've learned directly into you minds via telepathy. I think I've finally gotten the fact that you lot don't care for those who take liberties with telepathic contact (and he didn't so much as indicate Raven as he did _implicate_ her by the very fact that he _hadn't_ indicated her) so I figured I'd go ahead and ask this time. Besides, I wouldn't be able to let Raven there in on this one without her permission anyway, not with shields like those."

There was an enticingly (to Skye) icy distance to repay his compliment, and Skye was once again struck by how great she looked. That however, was pretty well beside the point after Cyborg, collecting nods from his teammates, gave Skye the go ahead. Apparently even Raven now was willing to take this first step of trust.

Taking their agreement in stride, Skye prepped himself for some really smooth work; it wouldn't do to mess up on his big chance to counter the crappy first impression he'd made. Getting a feel for each of their minds, he gathered a bit of telepathic energy and began extending tendrils of thought around the room. After a moment's indecision, he went ahead and included Starfire, figuring it would go a little ways to helping her regain her full senses. In any case, he soon had a light contact with each of them, the notable exception being Raven.

Despite her assent, his questing mental contact still landed softly on her implacable mind shield like a fly on a windshield, a solid wall of expertly organized energy keeping him decidedly out. Carefully, really hoping not to aggravate her, he went ahead and gave the telepathic equivalent of a polite knock, affecting her shield in such a way as to sound a soft inquiring sensation into her mind. Apparently, he'd finally managed to do something right, because the next moment, a small gap opened. Rather than allowing him entry, however, a black telepathic link shot out and rushed directly toward his own mind. His danger sense wasn't tripped, but he had little patience for funny business, so was not terribly pleased when she was speaking to him rather than the other way around.

"_I'll take care of the linking, okay?_" she 'pathed simply when she'd established a contact with his mind, a smug note in her mental tone, probably from the way she'd jacked his links to the others' minds and used them to press past his own outer shield. His flash of annoyance faded quickly as he decided she could play at showing off all she wanted, secure in the knowledge that when push came to shove, he could take her mind to mind. He just didn't relish trying to take her on in an actual fight where neither of them held back. In any case, he could understand her reluctance to let him control the link, so he didn't take up any complaint on the issue. These thoughts he kept close to his core to prevent accidentally transmitting them, then moved on to what he was supposed to be doing.

"_Can everybody hear this?_" he sent down the links, knowing that they could but wanting them to get used to the fact that he was speaking in their heads before he started beaming images into their minds.

He received a chorus of simple and nonchalant responses, though each of them did jump a little at the first sound of his telepathic voice. Skye found it mildly perplexing that they took it so well, as if voices started talking inside their heads on a regular basis. In fact, only Starfire seemed confused as to where his voice had come from. Of course, she was confused about a lot of things right now.

"Who said that?" she asked weakly, prying her eyes off Robin long enough to give another look around the room.

"_Oh, yes, Miss Starfire. I don't believe we've had the chance to be formally introduced. My name is Skye, I'm the pale gentleman standing next to Cyborg. I'm a psychic, and I'm using telepathy to speak directly into your mind._" Skye projected his introduction down every link allowing all to hear and grow further acclimated to his mental touch. It was his rather fanciful hope that they'd be good with his telepathy and he'd get to use it often—audible words were such a damn burden.

Starfire's response was a confused silence, her eyes finally finding him on the other side of the bed and widening as though she'd missed him on her first few passes. He could feel a question slowly forming in her muddled mind, and out of habit, he answered it for her before she could ask it.

"_I'm sorry for confusing you. Yes, I am a stranger, but circumstances have conspired to lead me into the company of the Titans. I made a rather desperate move in keeping that large man from complicating things bloodily downtown, and when I woke I was here, in this medical facility. Sort of as an apology for not arriving sooner and doing more to help, I went ahead and used some of my powers to speed the recovery of Beast Boy and you. I believe that about covers the important parts._" Once again he spoke down every link, simultaneously straining his senses to pick up their reactions. It was not lost on him that this was the most he'd even hinted at as far as his motivations were concerned, and was pleased to note that the others snapped it up with excitement. At least he knew he interested them.

"Oh, um, thank you..." began Starfire, sounding somewhat more lucid that she had a moment ago. "I know now that I suffered some kind of injury. Please, I believe you said something about explaining my condition. I would like to hear how I am doing now."

"_Great. Really, that's just wonderful. I'll have you all up and in on this in just a sec. Get ready, cause you're all about to feel quite a rush._" With that, Skye slid quickly and smoothly from light contacts to a heavier fare, pushing open the links to allow the much more complicated information he was about to start flinging about room to transmit. For Raven's benefit, he put the epicenter of his sending in a very clear part of his forebrain and pinched her contact with his mind shield until it was the only thing she had access to. He could feel a sting of annoyance from the direct link to her mind, and appreciated the fact that it was the first emotion he'd been able to sense of hers. Dropping that line of thought however, Skye began.

"_Alright, everyone close your eyes._"

(Raven)

"Does he really think I don't know to close my eyes?" thought Raven, but discretely, so it didn't make it out of her head. Of course, the next moment she had to admit to herself that it was a rather petty thought. The stranger was doing an admirable job of being charming and non-threatening, which of course made her feel all the more alarmed. Ever since Terra, not even counting that whole Melchior fiasco, she'd had it out for people trying to ingratiate themselves to her or her friends. Something about Skye just didn't sit right with her, and it _wasn't_ the fact that her heartbeat rose every time she thought about how great he looked.

That was about as far as she got before the show started, and more or less everything else fled her mind. With a swirling of colors in the black under her eyelids, an image appeared as clearly as though she'd imagined it herself, transmitted through the air from where her telepathic link to Skye was focused. The overall resolution was not that great, but anyone would have known it for a 3D silhouette of Starfire done completely in twirled bands of green and orange. Raven had a good guess as to what it was, but kept it to herself and listened to hear how Skye put it.

"_Ladies and gentlemen, if I may present my findings? Here we have a live image of Miss Starfire's aura, the unique patterning of energy that surrounds her and all other living things._"

"_Ooh, that's me?_" came a new thought-voice, this one light and fluttery rather than the cheerfully cool tone Skye had been using. Immediately Raven knew it was Starfire, and wondered at this new phenomenon.

"Hey, how come I just heard Starfire?" asked Beast Boy, and there was a crazy echo as the words came through as thoughts and sounds both. That set it off, and suddenly the thought network exploded with the noise of speech echoes and subvocalizations as everyone started to try out sending their thoughts through the air at the same time. Beast Boy and Cyborg quickly fell into a shouting match over whose thought-voice sounded cooler and Robin began bitching about his headache the next moment. Starfire continued to comment obliviously about how beautiful the world must be through ESP, showing just how quickly she was regaining her regular self. The cacophony was head-splitting.

"EVERYBODY SHUT UP," Raven thought forcefully, putting an edge on her tone that cut through the other thoughts. Instantly there was silence, every eye in the room wide and staring directly at her. Beast Boy slipped and fell from his precarious balance on Cyborg's shoulder where he'd been dealing major nuggie to his rival, and the sound of him hitting the floor was the room's only for a long moment.

"_Thanks. I was seriously considering just sucking the enthusiasm out of the room and dealing with the fallout when I could think clearly again,_" and a change to his tone told her that Skye was sending to only her.

"_Consider yourself lucky that you didn't_ (she tagged a wave of threat to the words). _Can we get this going now?_" and Raven reveled in the fact that she'd managed to totally disregard the weird feelings she'd had earlier and treat Skye with exactly the tone she felt he deserved. Maybe this would be a passing thing after all.

"_Fine, fine _(he changes back to everyone, all of whom still stand stunned from Raven's cutting telepathic shout) _Alright, close your eyes guys, and this time keep the thoughts down until the presentation comes to an end, alright?_"

With that, Raven once again slid her eyes shut and observed the image Skye had never stopped projecting, even through what must have been an exceptionally painful sit at the center of all those loud thoughts. The noise had nearly blown Raven's senses, so she could only imagine what it must have felt like to his, from the center of it all, and she reluctantly upped her opinion of his talents another notch. The next moment, he began sending thoughts again, and it turned out to actually be rather interesting.

"_Okay, please listen up. As I said earlier, this is a live image of Starfire's aura, transmitted directly from my senses to your minds. If you'll observe here,"_ silver arrows pointed at several slightly smudged areas on the otherwise pristinely twined colors,_ "you can see where the damage to her spirit has healed. At the rate she's going, even these will be completely gone within an hour or two. This doesn't sound too impressive until you consider that the same spots looked like this only one hour ago_," and now the image changed to a drastically different one.

This new image was unrecognizable, the vague outline of a humanoid form done in green and orange defaced with gaping slashes of red and black and wide broken swathes with jagged edges. Raven was forced to catch her breath, her limited experience with spiritual damage more than enough to understand that what she was looking at was fatal. It was a miracle Starfire had lived a single heartbeat past the beatdown she'd suffered, if that was what her soul had looked like, and Raven marveled at Tamaranean durability as she once again felt the sting of the near loss. She concentrated to sweep that away and listened to the next portion.

"_What I did was quite simple. Using a telepathic resonance field, I mended what areas I could and patched the larger holes with my own energy,_" and as he spoke the image changed as a transparent envelope of silver surrounded the mangled silhouette, the holes growing closed and patching over with silver in the most severely damaged places. "_Normally, the spirit will heal itself much like the body, the health of the mind and body being intrinsically linked to the state of the spirit's repair, and vicea versa. Like the body, some damage is too great to recover from, and will kill or paralyze the mind and the body in turn, no matter what the state of the physical tissues' repair. Even if all the great doctors and healers of this world were to work their powers of recovery on her, she would never have awakened as long as her spirit was too damaged to heal itself. _"

"Quick question," broke in Robin vocally, his detective's soul smelling a hole in the story, "you said yourself she was comatose... how did you help that? I assume it takes more than a little spirit-patching to get the mind back up and running, right?"

"_How nice of you to ask_," and Raven thought she caught a passing flash of annoyance through the link, as though he'd been avoiding the subject, "_I was attending to that while my resonance field fixed her spirit up. Basically I traced the connection between her physical body and her psychic core, the central portion of her personality comprised of her memories, hopes, fears, and desires. I followed it to the corner of the dreamscape it had fled to and initiated its return, then came back and finished cleansing her spirit._"

"Ummm... dreamscape?... psychic core?" asked Beast Boy, who had only recently bothered to peel himself off the floor and was now alternating listening with bugging Cyborg.

"I... _do not_ recall _any_ of that..." followed Starfire, who seemed bothered by something, a mild headache or other annoyance causing her to grimace. The grimace passed, but not before Skye had let a strange sense of interest slip his own shields, Raven growing suspicious over a possible connection.

"_Just chill out guys, this is a presentation of my diagnosis, not a class on psychic theory. I'll have time to answer all kinds of questions later, but now I'm going on, alright_?" Though he had seemed annoyed before, now he was back to being cool, and Raven didn't know if he'd put up better shields or really gone cold. The uncertainty bugged the crap out of her, as did the thought that he was better at being neutral than her, and the aggravation of course made more work for her besides. It was intolerable, but she managed to keep it all down anyway.

"_So anyway, I cleansed her spirit of damaged and decaying energy using surgical telepathic incisions_." As he spoke, the imaged changed again, this time showing silver ribbons striking through the red and black areas that still scarred the patched aura. After a few moments of passing through them, the ribbons completely removed the bad spots, leaving faint but properly colored aura in their places.

"_After that, I did a little post-surgical cleaning up and crossed my fingers. Unfortunately, the inverse of what I said earlier is also true, and no matter what the state of the spirit, the body can still die, and rarely hesitates to when the damage is as bad as it was here. Sucking out the pain and psychic dissonance can only do so much for internal bleeding and non-neurological trauma, I'm afraid._"

"That's where Raven came in, Right? She used her powers to keep Star's body alive once you'd gotten her brain and soul on the right track?" asked Cyborg, who'd been as intent on the explanation as Robin, despite having to give Beast Boy the occasional smack to get the little dweeb off him.

"_Yes,_" said Raven simply, subtly subverting Skye's link just to prove she could, projecting her own 'voice' to supercede his and snap up the answer. "_I used my powers to take the worst of her injuries into myself. As I've told you before, by sharing the injury empathetically, I can help it to heal._"

She had gotten under Skye's skin again, and so he sniped back again, altering the image completely to show the same figure done in a full color model of the muscle and tissue structure. It was impressive, showing off an entirely new side of his senses, and Raven realized that a game of one-upmanship could on for a long time between the two of them. The view was about as detailed as possible, like an illustration out of an anatomy book except it looked completely real, as though an actually flayed Starfire was standing in front of her, and the sight was a little disturbing.

"Hey, what happened? I thought we were looking at her aura?" asked Beast Boy, who opened his eyes to dispel the image (somewhat, it was still in his forebrain, but input from his actual eyes helped dull it down) and made some faces of disgust.

"_Yeah, that was my senses attuned to the spectral, how I normally view the world. This is my senses attuned to the physical, kind of like super-vision. It's called active clairvoyance, otherwise known as the sense of perception. My eyes barely work, but I can still see everything, all around me, all the time, not walls nor skin nor dark of night can obstruct it. I changed the view to examine her physical recovery. If you don't care to see it, just say so._"

"Well it is somewhat PERSONAL!" shouted Starfire, face burning where she lay on the bed, holding the covers tightly over her body as the image of her own skinless body rested statically in her mind.

"_Oh... right,_" and Skye zoomed the image in quickly so close that only the stomach could be seen, nothing of the breasts or genitalia even suggested anymore. Though Raven could think of no one sane who would find that enticing or sexual, she could still understand Starfire's embarrassment, and had to cut off another wave of anger at Skye's habit of taking things for granted.

"I'm out Skye, anatomy has always made me queasy," answered Beast Boy, looking, if possible, a bit more green than usual. Without responding, Skye shrunk the link to B.B.'s mind, Raven sensing the shift in energies through the entire web as a result. She was actually getting a little tired now, her telepathic senses having been worked harder today than pretty well any time in her memory. She was really much better at magic.

"_Anyway, Miss Raven's contribution was also quite significant, exactly as Cyborg stated earlier. If you'd look here,_" and the image changed to a sort of sickeningly realistic view of Starfire's internal organs, "_all of the trauma has been completely removed. An hour ago, I looked in and saw this,_" and now the image showed areas of puncturing and tearing, Skye adding silver arrows again to point out the places where vascular damage had resulted in internal bleeding. "_After Raven's beautiful work on it, it looked like this,_" and the same image was quickly replaced with one that looked much better. Raven remembered the healing job well, able to feel where all these injuries had been from her own physical experiencing of them, even if she hadn't been able to 'see' them as Skye so clearly could. The other thing she remembered was... "_However, the experienced eye would note that the damage was only mended, not removed, and there is no way in hell that a Tamaranean, Terran, or pretty well anyone else could recover from what damage remained in only an hour,_" and Skye finished her own thought quite exceptionally.

"Okay, so you've told us what you were doing, and that Starfire is fine now. So how about getting to that part about the gray light?" Robin was evidently even more anxious to find out about it than everyone else, and Raven speculated as to what exactly was getting him so uppity all of a sudden. Maybe he just didn't like the idea of Skye poking around in Starfire's soul and mind—she certainly didn't.

"What is this gray light you speak of? Did something else strange happen to me? Oh—um... not that I do not appreciate all your help friends. I know now that I would not be speaking to everyone without help from both of you!" and her radiant smile was enough to make the whole room brighten. Raven felt undeniable warmth encompass her heart as that smile lit the room, and it was a small struggle to keep her power from gripping that emotion and riding it into some kind of destructive expression.

"_Yes, but please, you owe me nothing at all. It was my clear responsibility to help you recover. Now, about the gray light... Starfire, you were completely stable after Raven and I did our stuff, but you had at least a week or two of recovery ahead of you before either of us expected you to awake. That you regained your senses so soon... well... it came as something of a surprise. Especially since it was accompanied by a gray luminescence,_" and now a new image, one of a highly detailed but otherwise normal view of Starfire in her bed surrounded by a gray aurora, replaced the anatomical exposition, "_that none of us have any explanation for, unfortunately including me. I did every kind of scan and search I know of, and there simply isn't any trace of whatever force accelerated your recovery like that. The only thing I can think of... nah._"

"_What is it?_" Raven snapped directly to his mind and no other, feeling something of what he was thinking about and latching on to the leaked thought immediately. The implication was clear, especially considering what had happened earlier when they touched.

"_Ah, I was waiting for you to come to the same conclusion as me,_" and he was also speaking only to her mind. "_It would seem that, though strangers we certainly be, our powers have a rather unique ability to interact. Neither of us could have caused her recovery so quickly, but..._"

"_Our powers combined, did something weird, and managed to heal things neither of us could even dream of. Shit._"

"_Yeah. So, you want to let them in on this? I'd just keep it mum myself, out of habit if nothing else, but it's your secret too, so I figure I'd let you decide._"

Raven was struck by this offer from him, mostly because of what went unspoken. He knew she didn't want the others to know about it, the last thing she needed just then was something else for them to think weird about her, or that she was somehow connected to this oddball. As surely as he knew that, he also knew that she didn't trust him enough for him to make an offer of sharing a secret like that. She'd been cool with the two of them just not talking about the way they'd shocked each other, that was just some weird shit of the regularly private variety, way less that what they were talking about now. It was almost as though the bastard was blackmailing her into giving him more trust than she'd even begun to consider. Fucking Shit.

"_Okay, lets just keep this between us shall we? There is just one more person we should let in on it, but what the others don't know about me won't hurt them._"

"_My thoughts exactly. Just let me talk these others out of here and we'll cover that angle too._" It wasn't until he said this that Raven realized that Skye had been talking to everyone else audibly while he'd been speaking with her mentally. Considering what a stunt he'd just pulled on her had absorbed her concentration, but apparently he'd still had enough left over to chat along with the others.

"So really, I don't think it's anything to worry about. Most likely the light was just a fluke side effect of all the healing energy used on her. My best guess as to why she recovered so quickly is misprognosis on my part. I suppose I just underestimated her ability heal. You know those Tamaraneans—they've got constitution."

"Okay man, whatever you say," responded Cyborg cheerfully as he continued to smack around with Beast Boy. Now that all danger and mystery was past, the two were completely back to their old antics. They might as well have handed Skye a free ticket to distracting them from what she wanted him to conceal.

"Great. So, tell you what: I'll stay here with Raven and make some last checks on Starfire's head while she patches up Robin. You guys can go tell the doctors to pack it up and scram, and then we'll all meet upstairs and we can talk while these two finish recovering."

"Sounds perfect man. You definitely have one _hell_ of a lot of explaining to do, but I've got a feeling it'll be a great story."

"Yeah, definitely," added Beast Boy rather redundantly, but then he was already changing into a monkey and using Cyborg's head as a bongo drum, laughing an apish laugh the whole way out of the room as Cy swatted at him.

"Hehehehe," an angelic giggling erupted from the bed next to Raven as Skye finished herding the two oblivious lugs out of the room. "It is good to see that everyone is doing so well after that terrible battle," said Starfire sweetly as she held her hands together near her face in an empty-armed hug and smiled ever more brilliantly. A sudden coughing from beside her made her face drop dramatically, a distraught expression blooming where her smile had been as remembrance of Robin's condition crushed her momentary joy. "Oh, Robin! I am so sorry, I forgot your pain in my happiness at everyone else's safety..." and she looked truly and deeply repentant, almost to tears, "how can you ever forgive my transgression?"

"Star..." and Robin spoke through a thick veneer of pain, "please don't worry about me. I'm just so happy... so happy to see you well. This... is nothing... really," and his voice gave out completely.

"That's enough chitchat out of you buddy," admonished Skye with a laugh under his words, "I just took a peek inside you, and you've _really_ done it this time..." after a moment of thought, he appends himself, "Or _we_'_ve_ done it, or whatever. Anyway, you've reopened your surgical scars something dreadful. Under different circumstances, you'd have to go under the knife again."

A powerful gasp from the bed alerted them to Starfire's continued concern. "You don't mean he may still be in danger? Oh Robin, please don't mistreat yourself like this, not for me. It would _ehalak nre ginbrab renalb prisnor_ to see you in such pain because of me!"

"Uh... I can guess what she just said, I think," commented Raven, who had never gotten used to her habit of slipping into Tamaranean whenever she was upset.

"It translates _very_ roughly to 'break my heart,' much as you'd expect, yes," filled in Skye, who was now moving back over to the far side of the bed he'd just evicted Cyborg from.

"You speak Tamaranean?" asked Starfire with deep wonder, her concern for Robin interrupted by this particularly unprecedented situation, though she still cradled his pale hand in her own from where she lay.

"I speak a lot of languages, but that isn't important right now. You, Miss Starfire, are, in my professional opinion, still in need of some sleep before you'll be fully healed."

"But I cannot sleep now! Robin needs me; I must stay by his side until he recovers. Besides this, I am not sleepy either, so I must refuse your professional opinion," this last she said with a huff, turning her nose up and away from him as she shifted her attention to her injured 'friend.' Raven noticed a determined expression on her face, as though she'd not give up on watching over him should the entire universe try to stop her. Unfortunately, Raven needed her to follow Skye's advice.

"_Isn't there anything you can do? I'm afraid she really wont follow anyone else's advice when she gets like this,_" Raven 'pathed to him reluctantly, knowing that she'd regret it but equally knowing that she was committed to this new course now.

"_So you're asking me to use some of my powers on her? Very well, I promise to be gentle, not that I have the heart to do anything serious to someone like her. Also please note that she really does need some sleep, I wasn't lying about that._" This of course only made Raven wonder what he _had_ been lying about, and much as she expected, she regretted asking him to do something right away.

"Miss Starfire, I really must insist. Raven and I will take care of Robin, you get some sleep." With a tilt of his head, he used some kind of power or other, Raven able to sense the force as it moved through the air. The mental contact brushed gently against Starfire's mind, and suddenly, her eyes were drooping unstoppably toward sleep.

"You... are forcing... me to... sleep?" was all she managed to get out before she was gone, swept away by needed rest and a soft, almost delicate snore.

"Why did you do that?" asked Robin, who'd apparently found a new source of strength to counter the pain that ground incessantly at his abdomen.

"Hey, I don't like forcing people to do things any more than the next guy, but she needed the sleep more than you needed her batting those pretty eyes at you, plus, Raven had something she wanted to talk with you about."

"Raven?" and Robin attempted futilely to turn in his chair and look at the sorceress behind him.

"It's nothing much, really, just something I'd rather the others didn't know." She said, preparing herself for the always-difficult task of sharing what she'd rather not.

"About your and Skye's powers having some kind of effect on one another, right?" and Raven was forced to squash her sudden panic, terrified that it had been that obvious, that anyone could already know it, and that she'd made those devil's deals with the stranger for nothing at all.

"Heh, calm down, I doubt the others even suspect. I'm the only one here who knows that Skye's power looks silvery-white, and it doesn't really take a detective to guess why gray light came out of someone pumped full of black and white energy. But really, is it such a big thing?" Privately, Raven hoped it wouldn't be such a big thing, but she couldn't let herself take that chance, not with something as weird as this.

"Robin, knowledge is power," stated Skye calmly as he walked back around the bed and stood near Raven. She really wished he'd stand further away from her, but dared not make any complaint. "You can never really tell how something like this, something really out of the ordinary, can be used, or how it can be used against you. The fewer people who know, the fewer people who can find a way to hurt us with it, you see? It's just precautionary really."

"Wow Raven, are all psychics as paranoid as you two?" and he meant it in the purest of humor. It fell a little flat however, when a trickle of blood leaked from the side of his mouth and he turned a particularly pathetic shade of green under his pale white.

"Damn. Okay, let's get this guy back on his feet. Would you like to start, or should I?"

"You did last time, you should again. I don't feel like experimenting with this right now," or ever, she added to herself, but then Skye was already beginning his work on Robin.

"I'll take care of that headache of yours, considering that there really isn't anything else for me to do on you. I'm not one hundred percent sure why, but your spirit just wasn't as badly damaged as Starfire's considering that you came equally close to the reaper last night." As he spoke, silver ribbons bled forth from the gems on his gloves, wrapping with incredible speed into a sphere around Robin's head and sparkling magnificently for a long moment. When they withdrew, Robin looked to be in about half as much pain as before, though he still hadn't regained his color.

(Robin)

"_That really feels much better—Ouuuucccch... Except now that... I'm not so distracted... by the headache... its easier to concentrate... on the **searing agony** **in my guts**,_" thought Robin as the swirling silver lights faded from his eyes.

"_Good, that was the idea, now Raven will have to help you with the rest,_" Skye's voice shot into his newly cleared head, and he realized that he'd been thinking loud enough for it to travel back over that link Skye'd formed with his mind. It was odd, because he couldn't feel anything, not the slightest difference. Robin's past experiences with telepathy had involved a sense of presence, a feeling of there being someone in his mind when the thought voice beamed in, but there was none of that with Skye. It was something he'd have to ask Raven about later.

"Just sit still Robin, and I'll have this done in a moment," Raven said from the other side of him, the most mysterious note of nervousness in her voice. Hearing that from such an unexpected source immediately made Robin nervous too.

"Hey, is there something I should be worried about here?" he asked breathlessly, the grinding pains in his stomach taking a back seat to the hard panic caused by Raven sounding nervous.

"No," both of them said simultaneously, using the exact same blankly calm tone that he'd come to associate with Raven hiding something. Apparently Skye also subscribed to that particular evasion tactic. Robin was fading quickly into a mire of crippling pain, but he still noticed Raven's eyes flickering slightly as she hesitated from where she'd been approaching to use her powers on him. They were speaking telepathically.

"Come on already... Just do it, I don't care about any risks!" he snapped, the force in his tone causing a burn of agony up his chest, so that he keeled over helplessly in his chair. From amid this blinding hurt then, a cool hand suddenly settled on his back.

"Ready or not..." Raven whispered cryptically, then followed with those magic words of hers, and the process started the next moment. A warm soothing sensation spread from that spot on his back until it had covered his entire abdomen, removing the pain and replacing it with a glorious numbness. When he looked down at his stomach, it was covered in Raven's mysterious white-edged black magical energy, or telepathic energy, or whatever. Robin bemusedly noted that he had a bunch of other stuff to ask about when the time for asking came, then blanked as he glorified in the lack of agony.

"Oohhh," he moaned softly, drooping forward to lean against Starfire's bed in relief. After a moment, he noticed that he wasn't the only one who'd moaned, and a quick glance caught the sight of Raven slowly loosing her balance from where she stood beside him. A flash of movement that he was way to dulled out to properly track swished by his ear, and Skye was behind Raven the next instant, pulling a chair out of a corner with his leg and flipping it into place to catch her before she fell.

"Wha—ugg!" Robin managed, but then stopped, realizing that moving his lungs too quickly made shooting pains resurface in his only partially healed guts. Skye's head never swiveled from where he pointed it sedately at Raven, but he answered Robin nonetheless.

"_I heard you, don't try to talk. Raven is fine, she just took in a little too much of your injury. She'll probably feel the pain of your internal damage for days now, rather than the light, couple-hour job I proposed she do. I guess this is what I get for trying to make a helpful suggestion—but I digress. How are you feeling?_" and he turned his head finally back toward Robin.

Robin guessed that it must not make much of a difference to Skye where his eyes were facing when he had senses that went every way at once, but dropped his jumbled musings as he registered the explanation and question. He chided himself for letting his mind wander then, his flash of concern for Raven still strong in his mind, despite his detective's penchant for analyzing people.

"I-ahh!"

"_I said don't talk_," Skye calmly reminded Robin, who had the presence of mind now to blush slightly at what a fool he'd just made of himself. He put it down to all the injuries and moved on, thinking really loud to make sure Skye could 'hear' it.

"_The pain is gone, but the injury is only partly healed. That's about par for Raven, though this is the worst injury I've ever seen her try to heal._"  
"_I'm willing to bet she knows better than to take a crack at stuff like this, empathic healing isn't exactly safe. The Spirit harmonics I use on souls and minds is harmless, if draining, for me, but what she does could kill her if she doesn't learn to let up. I repeat, you're really damn lucky to have a friend like her._"

"_Yeah,_" and Robin felt gratitude he was completely unable to express, not that he needed to, with these two.

"It's impolite to talk over someone's head, you know," Raven broken in verbally when she'd recovered from her disorientation and raised her head again, hot gravel of pain and annoyance cooking her tone. She clutched one hand over the pain and ethereal injury she'd removed from Robin into herself and gripped so tightly to the chair's arm with the other that her knuckles turned white.

"Just chill," and now Skye switched back to words as well, rubbing his forehead with one hand as though stung. Robin quickly guessed that Raven's generous streak of mind-to-mind contact had run completely dry with her new pain.

"Back away," was all Raven said in response, the intense concentration on her face clear as she fought down the pain masterfully, subduing it to her will much as she did her emotions.

"I could remove that pain from your system, if you want. I didn't do it to Robin cause it might have made it difficult for you to find and remove the full extent of his injuries during your healing job, but—"

"If you touch _one wisp_ of vampiric energy to _any_ portion of my mind, body, or spirit, I will _personally_ torture you to within an inch of death, then wait for you to recover and do it again. Do I make myself clear?" and she cast a sudden black glare at the floor in front of her, apparently confident that he could get every ounce of it's force from behind her and not feeling like turning to face the stranger.

"No prob'," he came back coolly, but Robin could detect a hint of nervousness in his body language, one that actually faded away to nothing as he watched. It was damn weird, but he had other things on his mind just then.

"If you two lovers are done quarreling now," and he got great satisfaction from the undisguiseable flinches each made at that comment, almost enough to counter the searing in his intestines that talking caused, "I'd kind of like to know when this thing is going to happen?"

"Don't look at me," Skye was the first to recover his composure after Robin's stabbing remark, "I've never tried to do this before. It took an hour for Star, which counts from when I added my power, ten-ish minutes after which Raven added hers. If you extrapolate the time gap, it should happen for you right about..." a sudden and unexpected force gripped every nerve in Robin's body, "now."

"AHHHAHAHA," screamed Robin, pained guts forgotten as pained everything flared to life in his body. It felt for the entire world like his blood had been replaced with quicksilver, fire and searing cold chasing each other through every nerve in his being as the process began. There was a rushing in his ears and flares of gray blanking out his vision, leaving him alone with the sensation of being ripped to shreds by a thousand tiny swords thrust mercilessly through him. His agony-fueled hold on the wheelchair threatened to tear the flimsy vehicle apart as his muscle's tensed and relaxed spasmodically. Then, as quickly as it had begun, it stopped, utterly and fully, without preamble or epilogue.

"Aaahh...haaa...ah?" his scream died out in confusion, no longer needed but not quite sure why. "Hey..." and Robin said this only because he had been totally wiped out by the gray light, "I feel really good!"

"Great, but to me, you feel really tired. Take a nap and we can all get together for a nice long chat a little later," and Skye said it with the tone of one who talks to an idiot or someone with a concussion.

"Wait—"but Robin was too slow, and Skye had swept through his mind like a cool breeze the next instant, a sudden deep fatigue pulling Robin from his wakefulness without any hope of his resisting. He had a fading vision of Starfire's soft hospital bed speeding toward his face, then velvety black consumed him.

(Skye)

"And that's that. All the Titans are now fully recovered and fighting fit... just about, anyway," Skye commented blithely as Robin's head hit the mattress. The young man's messy hair just brushed Starfire's thigh where it lay under the sheets, his hands drooping down the sides of the bed limply where he'd collapsed forward.

"Yeah, and it was a lot quicker than anyone could have hoped, thanks to _you_," and Raven's voice held an inexplicable accusatory tone, as though he'd just eaten a baby rather than helped to keep her friends from dying.

"What, there some law against being helpful?" and Skye was once again neutral, his blithe act dumped the moment he realized the game Raven had switched to.

"Let's just say I don't trust people who are too helpful without any apparent reason. You've been trying like hell to get on our good side since you fell out of the sky and conveniently interceded to stop that unstoppable killer." Raven was working up a damn good head of steam now, and Skye was far from ready to deal with it.

"To save all your lives, and, I might add, nearly loosing my own life in the process. Damn, it's not like what I did was all that mysteriously convenient and coincidental anyway!"

"And how do you mean that? You came out of nowhere and somehow laid out an enemy we couldn't scratch, and how do we even know you were injured in all that?"

"Come on! My powers drew me to the city. Why? I don't know, I've just learned to follow them where they lead me! I heard the battle from the other side of town and knew that was what my powers had tipped me off about. I show up, and a big blue guy is trying to turn some beautiful unconscious damsels into so much crushed person-jelly. I hop in and can't even faze the big motherfucker with any power I hold, so I go the desperate route and try to drain his rage, which I pegged as his power source. I underestimated him and nearly blew my mind trying to ditch all the energy the huge fuck was packing, then passed out from the strain and had to put humpty-dumpty a.k.a. _my mind_ back together again from the beacon I maintain on the astral plane. I came just as close to dying as any of you, so just drop the suspicious bullshit and give me a fucking chance, okay?"

The story spilled from his lips almost involuntarily, and he immediately regretted not editing parts of it. She wasn't Robin, but any sufficiently sharp mind could come up with all kinds of difficult questions from what he'd just let slip. Instead she seemed a little taken aback, as though she hadn't expected such heated honesty out of him any more than he'd expected to give it. As the anger quickly drained away to nothing then, he waited in silence for her to respond, the only sound in the room the soft breathing of the sweetly sleeping couple next to them.

"So that's your story?" she asked quietly, rubbing the aching spot on her stomach and staring fixedly at some distant point on the floor behind him. She seemed deep in thought, and Skye prepared a number of defenses in his mind as he waited for her counterstrike. She asked at long last then, "Where are you from?"

"Ah, ah, ah Raven, questions will be answered later, in the company of all," Skye switched gears back to playful to see if she was willing to put this off for a while. She wasn't.

"_Where_ are you _from_?" she asked heatedly, her gaze rising to stare daggers at him, distrust written all over her face at his reluctance to answer her.

"_Please_ Raven," he tried pleading, "there are good reasons I can't answer you now, _very, very_ good reasons, so just sit tight and I'll do my explaining a little later?" and the begging note in his tone was completely pathetic.

"Fine," and she turned away from him once more, wincing involuntarily at the ever-present ache in her intestines.

"My offer to drain that pain away still stands you know," he said as he turned toward the young couple in repose, once again recalling the image of the resonant souls. While Raven was distracted by her pain and his question, he discreetly ran an extremely fine connection between their minds, hoping to all hope that the hyper-paranoid (you know it's bad when Skye calls you this) woman he found himself so inexplicably attracted to (he had found her to be distinctly not his type over the past few minutes) didn't catch him with his mind in the cookie jar. The two deserved each other, and there was nothing like a shared dream to help slice through teenage awkwardness.

"And my threat still stands as well," Raven snapped back disinterestedly, and Skye pulled his attention back to her with mixed reluctance and happiness.

"Okay, then at least let me help you back to your room, you're not going to want to walk with that particular injury, you know," and he moved to grab this room's wheelchair from the corner behind them.

"Don't bother," she mumbled, "I can take care of this myself." With that she muttered something else, then rose slowly off the chair and suspended herself in midair. Skye sensed it happening behind him, but it took him a moment to believe it.

"You can levitate?" he asked, mixed awe and jealousy in his tone. It was nothing he hadn't seen before, but it was something he'd always wanted to try.

"Naturally," was her quiet response, sounding quite happy indeed to have impressed him so much.

"Well fine," his emotions had drained away again, and he sensed the incremental frown that told him his flip-flop had ticked her off, "I guess that's one less thing for me to do. How about you rustle up Starfire some clean cloths and I'll go get the guys to do the same for Robin? These two should be back up within the hour, and I doubt very much their desire to walk around in hospital gowns."

"Whatever," and she fled the room, melting through the ceiling like it wasn't there and once again catching Skye completely off guard. He could sense her as she moved upward, and she quickly advanced to one of the much larger rooms above him before getting out of his range and fading into the background of psychic interference.

He shook his head and muttered, "Sorceress, eh?" before leaving the room in his own conventional means, one last glance over his shoulder at the pair he was leaving behind. One hour of sleep would give them quite a little bit of fully lucid dreaming together. He hoped they appreciated the favor, not that he'd ever cop to having done it.

A Little Corner of the Dreamscape

Robin became aware that instead of blackness, the world around him had form and measure. As he gazed from one end of the panoramic landscape to the other, he took in the pristine emptiness of an endless snowfield, the blank white screen proceeding to the horizon broken only by the occasional towering spire of red stone. The night sky was completely clear, dotted with stars beyond numbering in clusters and sheets that threatened to overwhelm his senses with the sheer multitude of individual twinkling lights. It was only when he looked around at the tower of darkly colored stone upon which he stood that he realized where he was.

"Tamaran?" he asked himself out loud, hearing his voice echo ominously around the empty balcony he occupied.

"Yes, it is beautiful, is it not?" asked a familiar female voice, and Robin started as he realized that he wasn't alone here.

"Starfire?" he asked, and turned to look at the young beauty that leaned against the thick stone barrier between the balcony and a thousand-foot drop. Besides the fact that she was up and about in this mysterious place, she'd somehow changed into her Titans uniform, and so, for that matter, had he! She looked wistful to Robin, as though gazing out at the landscape of her homeworld struck some deep chord in her soul and took her on a ride through the kind of complex emotions no one could really enjoy.

"I often dream of my home, when I feel sad or when bad things have happened. It is a comfort," she continued as though she hadn't heard his confusion, as though she didn't even really know he was there.

"A dream?" Robin took a long look at the icy plain below him, "I'm dreaming that I'm on your homeworld?"

"Actually, _I_ am dreaming I am home again, and I believe I am also dreaming that you are here with me, though that is not a regular part of my dreams of home." She gained a deeply confused look, then continued, "I don't usually dream of Robin until..." and she trailed off, turning her face away from Robin as a deep blush bloomed out of his sight. Even if he wasn't real, she didn't want him to know about _those_ dreams.

"I'm your dream?" and Robin was sounding like a real fool, not quite able to get a grip on the situation. "I don't _feel_ like a dream, though I admit I'm not an expert on these things. Are you sure?"

"I don't see why you would be dreaming of Tamaran, you have hardly been there long enough, and your experience of my favorite view from the palace was not a pleasant one, if I recall. This dream is familiar to me, though you have never been here before. Perhaps... we are both dreaming?"

"You mean we're in the same dream?" another question from Robin.

"Yes, of course," and a real enthusiasm lifted her voice and face, "it would explain why neither of us feels like a dream! Isn't it wonderful Robin? Shared dreaming—it is like a dream come true! ... Oh wait..."

"Right, whatever's going on, it can hardly surprise me after all the weird crap that's happened these past two days," and Robin took another long look at the landscape. "So you really love this view back on your world, huh?" he asked, completely altering the direction he was going in before he got caught in brooding, something he knew could only to trouble now. Speculation was useless, and a night this beautiful was too perfect to waste. He had some things he was far overdue for getting off his chest, be this a dream or whatever else.

"Yes, it was here that I would always come when my elder sister was tormenting me, or when I felt lonely from the isolation of being princess. Somehow, gazing at the beautiful simpleness of my home always soothed my hurting," and Robin could detect the scars of very old wounds here, if from nothing else than from the way her eyes began to tear fitfully in the brilliant starlight.

"Starfire, why did you leave your home?" he asked her out of the blue, an old curiosity of his resurfacing as he moved over and leaned against the guard rail about a foot from her. He was determined to get that sadness out of her eyes before he tempted fate with the questions he really wanted to ask, the ones that made his warrior's heart turn to jello in his chest. She seemed caught off guard by his sudden inquiry, but after a moment's wide-eyed surprise, she nodded her head and wiped a small tear from the corner of her eye.

"It is funny, I believed for a while that none cared to know because none of you had asked me that before. I asked Raven about it one day, and she told me that it was an 'unspoken rule' that we did not ask for details about one another's past that the one does not personally volunteer. Do you violate that rule now?" and a quick bat of those enormous eyes quickly had Robin's pulse racing in a very frightening way.

"Uh—hey, you don't have to answer if you don't want to!" he offered quickly, trying to save himself from looking like a prying fool for breaking that rule or conversely like a condescending fuck for assuming she didn't know about it. This was off to a bad start already.

"Hehehe," her brilliant giggle made his heart leap and muscles all through his legs and back shiver imperceptibly, "It is not a problem at all. I was, 'pulling your arm?'"

"My arm? Do you mean my leg?" and a smile crept onto his face as she did that cute thing with the idioms again. He could swear she faked the trouble because she knew it made her look even more beautiful.

"Oh, yes—"and she blushed a creeping crimson across her cheeks and neck, magnifying her beauty once again, "my mistake. I was only trying to be funnier as Beast Boy advised. He also said I need to 'lighten up,' and 'get with the program,' though I do not think he believed me overweight or computerized," and a look of genuine confusion replaced her embarrassment as she once again poured over what the green one had meant by these comments.

"Heh heh," Robin gave a small chuckle at the magnificently cute look of consideration she held, "I wouldn't worry about it Star, you know he doesn't really know what he's talking about himself, so _you_ certainly shouldn't loose too much sleep over trying to understand it."

This time they shared a laugh, each of them slightly guilty for joking at their short friend's expense, but both equally caught up in the moment. As their mutual laughter died down, an unpleasant silence took it's place, each suddenly acutely aware of the other, and each becoming awkward and uncomfortable instantly as this overcame them. At the same moment then, Robin lifted his hand up to scratch at his hair and Starfire folded her hands together near her face, each beginning to speak at the exact same moment, then stopping suddenly when they realized that the other had spoken. Another short silence persisted before Robin fairly forced Starfire to go first.

"You asked me a question, and I was rude to you, for which I am truly sorry. Now please, if you still care to hear, it would be a simple matter to tell you of my history before I joined the Titans." When he simply nodded and smiled, she smiled back, then turned to look out over the landscape once again as she began.

"Tamaran has always been a planet of proud warriors and a great fighting tradition, stretching back as far as our history goes. In time, our society reached a peaceful state and began to create and learn on an incredible scale, discovering new powers hidden within ourselves, always keeping our fighting tradition alive as sacred arts of our history. Soon, we trained our natural abilities to allow for interplanetary and, with the discovery of the secret to faster than light travel, interstellar movement, allowing us to reach contact with our many neighbor stars and the powerful and intelligent aliens living on them. Unfortunately, virtually all of our neighbors also had interstellar capabilities and power hungry leaders with large armies."

"So Tamaran found itself surrounded on all sides by enemies, without so much as a single ship to fight back with?" asked Robin, urging her along as he listened in deep interest, admiring her intense expression as she built up her story.

"Yes, and an age of war followed. Because of our fighting spirit, none could dominate Tamaran, and never did a single enemy bring us to our knees or set a foot on our world in aggression, until the Gordanians. They attacked with evil weapons, the _Ha'gack Na Gur'nd_, what you would call weapons of terror, meant to break our spirit with our world's desiccation. You see, Tamaran was not always this icy wonderland you now see..."

"_What_? You mean...!?" and Robin could hardly contain his shock and disgust, simply unable to comprehend such barbaric battle tactics.

"It was once a planet of lush jungles and endless oceans, hotter than your Earth and by far the most beautiful jewel in our sector of space. It was the _Ha'gack Na Gur'nd_ that ended this in the first coming of the Gordanians, and forever after they were the nemesis of our people. Now the beauty our planet held lives on only in legends of that long ago time, almost all art and solid documentation of it lost in the chaos of that age, because the wars still raged on, even as we slowly adapted to the ice-ball our world had been so foully transmuted into... and..."

Her voice began to falter, then completely broke, slow tears dripping down her cheeks to fall softly on the uncaring stone of the tower. Robin advanced without hesitation, placing his hand over hers where it lay against the stone barrier and looking to her face with warm concern. She glanced in panic at his hand on hers, then to his face, then looked away with a blush, her tears stolen by his supportive gesture, warmth seeming to spread through her whole body from where his gloved hand lay over hers.

"Please, go on," Robin offered after a long moment, his hand never moving from where it lay, though the cold sweat on his brow and the quaking in his guts screamed at him to back away and apologize, anything to prevent what was coming.

"So that was the first coming of the Gordanians. After that came years and years more of warfare, the rise and fall of planetary governments and alliances, and the reduction of Tamaran's population to tiny, nearly unimaginably small numbers. The new environment could hardly support us, poisoned as it was by warfare and stripped of nearly all life. Those of us that survived often faced changes, both physical and mental, some going mad and others mutating terribly. My powers, the power of Tamaran's Royal family to use starbolts, is not natural to Tamaraneans, but rather a mutation that arose in this period. It was also what made my caretaker and all in his family line so very enormous. Still we lived on, always free despite our hardships, until an old scourge returned again, back when I was but a child, barely old enough to learn the sacred combat arts of my people." She paused here, catching her breath and gathering herself once again as she scrounged up bad memories. He couldn't really tell, but she seemed to have leaned closer to him as she talked, and every instinct in his body protested what was coming, even as he fought against them for control.

"The Gordanians returned after all those generations of silence," she continued, "bearing with them new alliances and more powerful weapons than ever before. Even with our own allies, we never really stood a chance, and Tamaran finally fell after some weeks of horrible fighting. The skies were lit with the fires of ships exploding, even as the very snow burned with spilt fuel and crimson blood."

"Starfire, I never knew you'd seen actual war," Robin said, when it seemed as though she was about to be overcome by the memories. The last thing Robin wanted was for her to suffer terrifying flashbacks because he couldn't keep his mouth shut about idle curiosity.

"I never care to again," she said quietly, and left it at that before continuing. "The Gordanians had no real use for Tamaran, the population so small at this point that we would not even be valuable as slaves. They attacked only to settle old scores and humiliate a proud people, so demanded nothing in the surrender treaty other than the heads of our leaders and the permanent disbanding of our army. My parents gave themselves up peacefully to spare us all annihilation, and went to their ends as only proud Tamaranean warriors can."

"My god, so that's how you lost your parents? I also lost mine at an early age, I know it's hard to cope after that kind of thing," and Robin had a flash of blood on the stinking straw under the Big Top before he could push that old pain away. He could certainly appreciate what it took for her to bear her soul like this, and gripped her hand slightly to show it. She looked up and smiled at him, and his center instantly melted, all nerves and instincts pushed aside by that look.

"I know something of your circumstances, it was why I chose to speak of these things to you. I knew that you would understand me," and she too felt quite gooey inside, heat still blasting through her body from where he gripped her hand and soothing compassion radiating from his face to touch her heart where bad memories had tormented it. The heated silence became almost unbearable, so Starfire hurried to fill it with her story's conclusion.

"Things simply were never the same on my world again. Even after a new alliance rose up and drove back the Gordanians, forcing them into an armistice to forestall bloody stalemate, even after the surrender of Tamaran was repudiated and we were allowed to form our defense forces once more, still things never improved for me there. Once my parents were gone, the position of princess became full of pressures and responsibilities that I never adjusted to. It was worse on Blackfire, who was expected to take the throne, and I fear it was those years after our parents died that made her into the bitter criminal and betrayer that she now is, though I foolishly never noticed the change happening. She was quite kind once, and I thought her to still be so until it was nearly too late. She fled the planet to live free, and I waited only a short time before doing the same. It was simply never possible for me to be comfortable there, my own home becoming not my home, so I left to find another. With time I found Earth, and the Titans. My new home." As she finished, she turned her gaze slowly from the snowfields to the stars, searching in vain for the one that represented that place which had supplanted her planet of birth as her heart's true home.

"Your new home with your new family," added Robin, whose gaze never left Starfire's softly curving face, drinking in the generous draughts of her beauty that he rarely allowed himself to taste, for fear of what might happen.

"Yes, my new family..." and she turned her gaze to his masked face, those strong features guarded by the mystique of a single black strip, and felt herself overcome by an indescribable sensation. "My family... and perhaps... something more?" she managed to squeak out before any of the usual fears and uncertainties could silence her. The night was magical, and all inhibitions seemed to be running on low, though once the words had escaped her lips she immediately wished she could bite them back, prevent them from reaching his ears, anything to forestall the terrible shadow of rejection that even now reared it's hideous features.

"_Starfire_?" and the single question spoke volumes, Robin expressing a massive range of shock and surprise with that lone utterance. He simply had not been prepared for her to say something like that, not when he himself was searching fruitlessly for some method of saying much the same thing. In his shock however, he'd screwed up again, Starfire interpreting his surprise as disgust or some other clearly negative response, her whole face and body crumbling under an embarrassment and humiliation that threatened to break her at the middle and work it's way out.

"It is not—I didn't mean—please, don't—"she stammered in a panic as she tried to pull away from him, to flee his rejection and escape her humiliation as her deepest and most secret fear was brought to life in luminous Technicolor detail. Robin moved decisively at last then, unable to bear the sight of such misplaced pain for a second longer, heart leaping from surprise to joy in a single transition of unfathomable speed that slipped his nimble form inside her staggering guard and wrapped his arms around her back. Head suddenly next to hers, ear to ear, he felt her body go stiff from fear and her own new shock, then melt into his embrace even as he began to heat up uncontrollably from every point his body touched hers now.

"Star, don't worry, I... I feel the same as you—I always have, I just couldn't admit it to myself."

"Robin—"

"Please, just let me talk for now. From the moment I first laid eyes on you, I knew there was something different about you, something special. For the longest time, I was afraid to say it, afraid to admit to myself that I had feelings for you, afraid of what it would mean for me, for you, for the Titans. You see, when I was very young, just getting into crimefighting, I saw what happened to my mentor, Batman, whenever he became involved with women: tragedy, pure and simple. He came to believe that no woman he ever loved could be safe, no matter what he did to protect them, and I took that fear into myself, promising myself that I would never admit to love, lest I destroy the one I love. It was the path I chose, but until I met you, I thought it would be an easy path, the one less likely to bring pain and suffering. I... was wrong."

"Oh Robin, I... I never knew. You always seemed so strong, so far away. I always wanted to approach you, to speak with you, to somehow share the enormous burden you always take upon yourself, but I never could. You always pushed me away, pushed us all away—I thought it was because, no matter how much we were ever friends, you had no interest in anything more. I thought it was because I am not human."

"Star, please, don't say that! You may not have been born on Earth, but to me, you're just as human as any of us, more human than people like Slade and Brother Blood by far! Your kindness, your loyalty, it's things like those that make a person human, not petty physical features and eccentricities of culture and language! The only reason I wouldn't let you near was because I was afraid. Afraid and arrogant, believing that I was the only one who could bear what I have and terrified that I might cause another harm by seeking help with it. You taught me to share my burden, and it has saved my life, my sanity, and my heart from destruction. It was then that I learned... that I knew... Starfire—I love you."

The Words were out now, and there was no retracting them. But suddenly, Robin didn't care, didn't want to retract them. For the first time, he'd said them out loud, and in their expression, their complete truth was revealed. In that moment, all concerns melted away, all fears became mere phantoms to vanish with the sunlight of the burning heat now raging in his chest, the woman in his embrace fueling the fire by her mere presence.

Suddenly, she moved, pushing against his embrace with irresistible strength until she'd pulled her head away and could look him in the face. Her eyes searched his features for several long moments, and Robin could only wait with baited breath for what she had to say. He'd borne all, and now was exposed, his complete acceptance of what he felt threatened now only by the unknowable position of this other party. Without warning, tears began to well up in the green jewels of her eyes, dripping quick and hot down her face to fall between them. A heated panic gripped Robin as his mind raced for what could cause her tears now, nothing at all pleasant coming to mind.

"Starfire, what's the matter, please!" he begged, putting a gloved hand to her face to wipe away a tear before it could fall to the ground. She merely shook her head away from his hand and pulled him into an embrace of her own, a desperate and wild action that was nearly painful. She buried her face in his stunned shoulder as she began to squeeze him with all her strength, as though fearing he might vanish if she should loosen her grip on him. To his great surprise, he could still breathe, and even talk.

"What is it Starfire? Please let me help, don't shut me out, not now!" he continued to plead with her, and this time got a response.

"Why? Why must these wondrous things always come in dreams? Such happiness as I have never felt, such joy, only dreams! Phantoms, ghosts, lies of my own desires! I squeeze and squeeze, but still you speak as though I do not grip you at all! It is a dream, a lie, a false hope to haunt my nightmares, it is awful!" and she cried freely, her very heart bleeding out her eyes and onto to his shoulder, crushed by a fear that Robin could barely understand, much less comfort. He was sure as hell going to try though.

"Starfire, listen to me! We may be dreaming, but that doesn't make this any less true! I love you, I will always love you, and I'll definitely still love you when we both wake up! Please Starfire, believe me! I mean, even if this is only your dream, is that a reason not to enjoy it?" this last he tried in a desperate effort to get her to stop, to calm down, and to let go of him, her grip still completely immobilizing him despite the fact that it failed to crush the life from him. To his great surprise, it worked, and she pulled back to look at him once more before slipping into a more relaxed embrace with him.

"You are right, there is no reason not to enjoy this dream, it is a good one, after all," and a smile slowly spread across her face as her eyes dried out. She looked once more at Robin, who smiled mysteriously, a look of deep and wild amusement on his face.

"I think you'll sing a different tune when we both wake up," he said simply, the mischievous grin never leaving his face. She merely gave him a sideways glance, as though she was completely unwilling to let this 'Dream Robin' bait her with his pleasant lies. Robin decided to wipe that look off her face and do something he'd wanted to do for longer than he could properly account for. Without saying another word or giving her any more time to think, Robin slipped forward once again and pulled Starfire tight to his chest, his face only inches from hers.

"I truly hope this is something that won't always be only in your dreams," he whispered, then tilted his head slightly and pressed his lips against hers. The effect was of an electric circuit being completed, a switch closing and letting millions of volts of brilliant energy pass between the two in an endless loop of bliss. The kiss deepened, and suddenly they were no longer on the ground, Starfire tightening her grip on Robin as she began to rise fitfully from the ground. In moments they were rotating slowly up into the air, not that either of them really cared, considering they each had all they truly needed wrapped in a lover's embrace already, the outside world hardly seemed important.

As the pure joy of the moment continued to pulse through Starfire, they rose faster, beginning to spin slowly, her hair and his cape rising to flutter in the wind as they spiraled through the sky, completely lost in one another. The endless starfield above them was their backdrop then as they floated so many thousands of feet in the air, nothing below them but the white snow and towering stone spires, nothing between them but the warmth of one another's bodies, each the other's entire universe. The kiss ended, and both opened their eyes, one gazing deeply into the other's as they savored the moment.

"Robin," Starfire whispered, as she carried the two of them across the sky in slow gyrations, "I love you too." He just smiled, lost in his attempt to memorize every individual nuance of her face, the words she'd uttered already communicated long ago, their actual admission no longer necessary for Robin to know them in his heart.

Suddenly however, as all great things must, the dream began to fade, their surroundings sliding away slowly into blackness, until it was only the two of them suspended in an empty void. As the two held each other in silence then, there was only the quiet warmth between them to fill their empty universe, neither able to see or feel the other's touch in the supreme absence of everything. Starfire took comfort in the warmth, even as it too faded, leaving her alone in the void, alone with the unshakeable fear that it had all been a figment of her imagination and desires, but also with the secret hope that it was real. Robin had no such worries, and would make that quite clear momentarily.

Titans Tower Med-bay, Starfire's Room

When he opened his eyes, Robin was lying on his arms leaned over in his wheelchair, exactly where he'd been when Skye had forced that nap on him. He was now quite a bit less inclined to anger at the other man's actions, and if his suspicions about the origins of that crazy wonderful shared dream were accurate, owed the nosy bastard his utmost gratitude. This was what passed through his mind then as he lifted his head to gaze up at the woman he loved, seeking to confront her about the dream and confirm it's truth, or otherwise to spill his guts all over again now that his course had been so firmly set. However, as he turned his gaze toward his love, he was greeted with something of a peculiar sight.

Starfire's bed was empty, or rather, she wasn't in it anymore. Instead, to look upon her, he was forced to tilt his head back and back, following several long trailing bed sheets up to the ceiling, where she floated serenely under her covers, as though she'd simply lifted off her bed in her sleep. That pretty well answered his question about what she'd just dreamt of, and he smiled as he stood, noting with pleasure that all the pain had gone from his body, leaving only a slight stiffness where near-mortal injury had once been.

Even as he got to his feet, Starfire made some small sounds of awakening, the bundle of sheets and brilliant hair that hung near the ceiling rustling as she moved about. In the muddle of her wake up, she must have lost the thread of what had joyed her into the air, because she dropped suddenly like a stone, shrieking abruptly at the sensation of falling. With an agile motion, Robin was there, catching her in his arms and cradling her to him, wrapped as she was in her white hospital covers. Starfire quickly struggled out of the bundle, flipping the sheets out of her eyes and looking up in rather stunned amazement at the figure that now held her.

"Good morning Starfire, fancy meeting you here," he said jauntily as he hefted her in his arms, wallowing in the look of amazement on her face. He decided to press the advantage while he had the chance.

"You know Star," he said, a grin on his face and confusion on hers, "I had the weirdest dream a minute ago. I went to sleep in the room here—Skye's orders after the healing job, which worked perfectly—and whom should I happen to dream of but you? It was just you and I, and we were on a balcony on Tamaran of all places. Isn't that something?" and now he held his smile ever wider and waited in exquisite anticipation for her to fully waken and hopefully catch on to what he was saying. He didn't have to wait long.

"Robin?" she asked, a thread of the realization in her tone blooming upward as something she could hardly believe smashed it's way into her mind. "_Oh Robin_!" and now it was true, she remembered, and she knew what all it entailed. With a small effort, she managed to lean forward and wrap her arms around his neck as he held her up, each of them reenacting their staring contest from the dream, allowing their eyes to consume one another's features as if to cement the birth of this beautiful new relationship. The happiness that flowed through Starfire at this moment made her much lighter in Robin's arms, and he took the opportunity to pull her closer to him, until their faces were only inches apart once more. Here we see the difference between dreams and reality.

Their sudden closeness found one of the few things that could possibly have distracted Robin from the kiss that he hungered to share with Starfire in reality. Without getting too graphic here, let's just say that certain extremely wonderful female body parts were pressed into Robin's chest with only the drastically thin barrier of hospital gowns to mask the sensation, Robin reacting in a perfectly natural way that was nonetheless put a damper on his sociability quite quickly. This was because, of course, in a hospital gown, there is no way in hell for a man to mask being _that_ happy to see a woman. Recovering as gracefully as possible, he set Starfire down and collapsed to the floor, turning away quickly before she noticed and started asking difficult questions. Besides being way away from that stage of the relationship, Robin was utterly certain that he would have to explain all kinds of awkward things should she ask, and that was definitely no task for a guy to do for a girl like Starfire.

When she asked him what the matter was, he assured her he had simply overestimated how recovered he was, and when she panicked about him being hurt again over her, he kicked himself and assured her that wasn't the case either. Things were just about to go totally south when a sudden knock and shout from outside the door announced the presence of Skye. Lord if that guy didn't have the timing of a saint, or so thought Robin anyway.

(Skye)

Standing outside the room, Beast Boy, Cyborg, and Raven at his back (they'd picked up and followed him down when he announced the recovering pair's awakening), Skye knocked once more when his first shout had no clear response. He could 'see' into the room, and the scene was one that assured him his actions had been a brilliant move, though his desire to let the two take it at their own pace from here kept him silent on their rather flagrantly indecent status inside. Completely outside his normal _modus opperandi_, he waited while Robin's ninja-like movements straightened the bed sheets to prevent any illicit suspicions on their parts and whispered a quickly and eagerly accepted offer of dinner and a movie this Friday. So it was that in no indecent time, he advanced to the door and opened it for them, none of the others the wiser to their new relationship just yet.

Then of course, the guys got Robin into the next room and handed him a new costume, cape, and body armor package to get changed with, Raven doing much the same for Starfire in her room. When everyone was decent again, they proceeded upstairs, the topic of the moment shifting quickly from Robin's miraculous recovery under Raven's ministrations to Skye, and all the biting questions the Titans harbored over him. As they walked, Robin and Starfire managed to remain inconspicuously close together, while Raven and Skye managed to stay as far apart as possible. It was simple really, Raven taking a sudden and unexpected interest in Cyborg's new T-Car modifications (much to the big guy's ecstatic pleasure), and Skye answering some of Beast Boy's simple questions about what all you can do with clairvoyance (yes you can see through cloths, but a guy gets over that pretty quick, really, it looses it's allure so fast as to be completely beside the point). Hell, it would seem that they were all already getting along, which was a damn good thing for the universe.

Preview: Where there is light, there is also darkness, and now the birth of a new love must also signal the birth of a new nightmare. The next story arc will be coated in so much undiluted evil that I may temporarily raise the rating to R, but I'm not quite sure. You see, a certain blond bombshell known for betrayal will find herself trapped in a nightmare within a nightmare (figuratively this time, I'm not doing another dream sequence) as the devil she sold her soul to comes back to collect. The villain of Jump City is not happy that outsiders are muscling in on his territory, after all, and will not hesitate to use _every_ tool at his disposal to remove this competition. Stay tuned here for: Gang Wars


	14. Gang Wars part 1

This Chapter is Rated R 

Intro: This one turned out really great, no doubt about it. I had to pump the rating a little, but really, if you're mature enough to have stuck through the plot so far, nothing here should be all that terribly offensive or shocking. There are strong sexual themes, but this isn't pornography. There are descriptions of gross violence and murder, but not extremely graphic ones. The rating is really only there to hopefully ward off anyone who cares to be warned of such things ahead of time and to cover my ass with the site organizers.

Chapter 14: Gang Wars Part 1

A Dark, Secret Place 

Brother Blood came slowly to his senses, his mind clearing from a fog of drug-induced unconsciousness. He immediately noted an acrid taste on his tongue, clearly indicative of whatever he'd been slipped in that last drink he'd had. His most recent memory was of taking a quiet dinner alone in the safehouse he'd been planning his most recent intrigues from, something that could have happened days ago for all he knew at this point. As he opened his eyes, he noted that his hands were bound extremely securely to the chair he sat stooped forward in, and that there was something heavy on his head. Already forming plans for his escape and revenge, he began to take in his surroundings.

The room he sat in was poorly lit, an indeterminate source of harsh white light directly above him mysteriously illuminating only a single circle of blank space around him. Whatever the floors and other surfaces were made of, they sucked the light in and kept it, preventing it from revealing any more of the room. He noted that the chair he was bound to was of high quality metal and plastic construction, managing to be very comfortable and virtually unbreakable at the same time. Unable to see whatever it was that sat so heavily upon his brow, he resigned himself temporarily to waiting until whoever it was that had done this to him revealed him or herself. Escape, for now, was out of the question, better to dwell on the sweet revenge he would take on his captor.

"Ah, Brother Blood, I see you've finally seen it fit to treat me to your consciousness," spoke a low, dignified, supremely threatening voice out of the complete blackness of the room. Tricks of the acoustics made it sound like the voice came from everywhere, and also made it impossible to figure the size of the room from the sound, and thus revealed nothing. Blood's eyes darted deftly around those areas he could turn them to, but no change had occurred anywhere he could perceive. The voice was not particularly familiar to him.

"I apologize for the abrupt and rather forceful nature of my summons, but I thought it best if I removed the inconvenience of your choice in the matters I seek your aid with," the mystery voice continued, and Blood began to form suspicions and plots compulsively, seeking any advantage he might gain to elevate him from his supremely vulnerable position.

"Might I ask whose company I have the pleasure of enjoining?" Blood asked, his oily voice making the words into a kind of audible velvet that slunk through the air. His talent for speech was of great personal pride to him, factoring as it did so closely into his chosen profession. It was his internal boast that he could make a grocery list read as charismatic and seductive.

"Why yes, how rude of me," and the powerfully menacing voice suggested no shred of actual remorse, "I merely _assumed_ that you would recognize the voice of such an _old_ and _dear_ (the voice somehow made these words sound like a kind of joke) business associate." With this latest comment, a metallic clack signaled the illumination of another starkly bright lamp, this one casting a single circle of light on a figure about ten feet from Blood.

This figure was one of a powerful man, huge in a chiseled muscular fashion, but held with a poise that spoke of undeniable grace and sureness of movement, a deadly combination. The man's body was encased in a composite of body armor clearly designed to provide maximum protection and freedom of movement simultaneously, the equipment of a fighter's fighter to be certain. Done in orange, black, and gray, the suit traveled upward in hard-edged rigidity to an oval mask, half-orange, half-black. The orange half had a single eye-slit, the other side as blank as a sheet of obsidian, black as a demon's heart.

"Mr. Slade?" and now Blood's voice was altered by the intrusion of unwanted but unavoidable fear. Being bound and at the 'mercy' of such a terrible specimen of the criminal element, the villain of all villains as far as anyone on this coast was concerned, was something to strike fear into the most confidant of hearts. Fortunately for Blood, he was able to use his skill to cut off the fear and clear his mind, bringing his façade of absolute self-assurance back to the forefront. He may be up against Slade, but Slade was up against Brother Blood, and would soon regret this unforgivable transgression.

"Why, Mr. Slade! I didn't know you were back in town!" he recovered, turning his fearful question into an exuberant greeting, "If you had simply asked, I would have been more than happy to hear about any special contracts of service I might render for you. This was unnecessary to be sure, and I truly wonder why you still keep me bonded, even now?" Blood placed every ounce of grease his silver tongue could muster into his words, in his own mind already able to hear the evil chuckle and quick capitulation of the terribly dangerous adversary/customer before him. He didn't know Slade's game, but he was confident in his ability to play it by his own rules.

"I would place it under the strictest of advisement, _Brother Blood_," and now the voice fairly echoed with the undercurrents of power and deadly threat they masked, "That you realize it will be your actions that determine your fate from now on, not your words. To this end, I suggest you be quiet and listen to my orders, which you will carry out without question."

Incensed, Blood fumed behind his appeasing mask, wanting desperately to burn the arrogant bastard's mind down to a nub and leave him to vegetate in his dark lair. Deciding that escape had once more become the priority over revenge, he instead grew his smile ever wider and warmed up his power behind his eyes.

"Please now Mr. Slade," and Blood began to press his power into the words, giving them the force of irresistible compulsion, "Clearly the best course of action would be to release me and discuss this matter like two civil men. Surely we can reach a mutually agreeable understanding on this?" and he made his move, energizing his mind control and sending it out to touch his helpless opponent's psyche. Now shouldn't he have known better?

"AAAHAHAHGGGGAHGAAGHAA," his cries of agony were torn continuously from his lips by the soul-burning pain of electrocution. The instant his power had tried to truly reach out of his mind, the crown upon his head had buzzed with electricity, sending jolts of hot agony flashing through his body. The torture was short, but the shock to his brain left him stunned and euphoric for several minutes afterward, Slade standing in perfectly silent observation as he recovered his senses.

"Now do you see the position you're in?" he asked when Blood had recovered enough to focus his eyes again on his captor. "I have you completely under my power, you will not use your abilities, you will not get out of that chair, you will not eat or drink, you will not do anything at all without my permission. If you try to use those impressive abilities of yours while my psychic inhibitor crown graces your head, you will regret the experience. Do I have your full attention now?"

Blood merely nodded, becoming ever more wary of his situation. Without his powers, his options for escape were limited, and he had no desire whatsoever to feel that shock again, so he capitulated with a slight nod. He took solace in the knowledge that the only possible reason Slade had done this to him was to harness his mental powers, so the crown would come off eventually. That would be his time to strike.

"Good, now listen carefully," and Slade's iron voice was aloof and condescending, as though he spoke to one of his brainless lackeys. "There have been several most distressing developments in Jump City, _my_ City, over the past few weeks. These developments threaten my interests here, and you are going to help me secure them again."

Blood silently wondered what could "distress" Slade, much less threaten his interests. He knew with a bitter certainty that his own actions in Jump had been permitted only as a subordinate to Slade's plans, expanding when the dictator of crime had taken his mysterious leave of absence and no sooner. It was a thought that grated.

"Here," and Slade indicated a hand to his right, illuminating a view screen that had been invisible in the darkness. The first image showed a number of gunmetal-gray gears fitted together on an orange background, all overlain with a bladed "S," Slade's own calling card. Blood supposed the gears were supposed to represent the intricate plot, the carefully lain trap, and the ever-working mind that his arrogant host prided himself on.

Before continuing, Slade turned and took a few steps back into the darkness, a new lamp lighting over a Spartan throne carved from a single slab of stone. With a slow dignity, he mounted the throne and leaned over to prop his masked chin on his gauntleted fist, his elbow poised on the armrest. As he waved his free hand again, a new image appeared, this time a high-quality photograph of a blond woman in a business suit just stepping out of a car. The woman was clearly extremely beautiful, easily super-model standard, with her curly hair was done up in a prim ponytail and a set of expensive sunglasses.

"This woman appeared in the city three weeks ago and began a company called Green Construction. The company has experienced unprecedented success, which was why I suspected it immediately when Jump erupted with crime that I neither authorized nor profited from. I've traced a number of...'activities', back to Green Construction—activities that I will not permit to continue unchecked. The disappearance of rare materials, kidnappings, consolidation of the petty criminals that pay tribute to me, the hostile takeover of my drug dealing empire, my night clubs, my gambling operations, _everything_ I've built up here over the past year has been taken over in my absence."

"Oh, certainly the initial losses were to be expected: my lieutenants going rouge when they thought me gone, local toughs muscling in on a business or two, other criminals opening up their own operations in my territory," and Slade gave Blood a slant-eyed glare of malice after this last one, "But that was all predictable and easily remedied with my return. This!" and he waved his hand once more, this time with a wild swing that spoke of barely submerged rage, causing a new screen to light up next to the one with the picture of the woman. The new screen held a map of Jump covered in dozens of orange squares and gear marks, dated a few months back, around the time Slade vanished. As he watched, Blood saw the date advance to two weeks ago, then count up to what must be today, the orange squares becoming green and the gears replaced with white letter "G" marks. The map was completely transformed.

"THIS!" Slade screamed it now, loosing his rage into the room, "THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE! NO ONE challenges me! I _will not_ be _beaten_ by these _upstarts_ from _nowhere_! I WILL punish them for their insolent posturing toward MY domain!" and with this last exclamation, Slade slammed his fist into the arm of his throne. The resonating crash of metal on rock echoed through the blackness around them, then faded away to nothing, the room returning to the blank silence it had held when Blood first awakened. Deciding it was high time to venture another comment, Blood spoke his part.

"Mr. Slade, I can understand that you aren't entirely happy with me, but please, I'm willing to help in any way I can." Blood's voice dripped with appeasement and deference, masking what was, in effect, a demand for the raging crime lord to get to the point.

"Oh don't worry Blood, you will be of most eminent use to me before this is over. You see, my spies, as almost completely useless as they've been against this opponent's counterintelligence forces, have managed to net me indisputable proof that they use mind control to keep their minions in line. Mind control means telepaths, and telepaths mean I need something to fight telepaths with. I obtained that amusing little hat of yours among a number of devices proven effective against such opponents. However, it is well known that the only truly effective weapon against a powerful telepath is..."

"Another telepath," Blood completed the phrase himself. He had known this was a question of his powers, and now he had the proof. "I see why you came to me then. I don't like to brag, but there truly isn't much on this planet that can compete with my mental powers." Blood continued to cooperate, but with dignity now. His mind steadily cranked out plans to make Slade pay, but for now he needed to get out of the chair and this damn inhibitor crown.

"Yes, though that truly isn't the reason I picked you," Slade answered, the cruel smile that his mask concealed expressed in his tone. "One thing I search for in the tools I use is how easily I can control them, how much leverage I can hold over them to bend them to my will. And, well, Brother Blood, I think I'll just say that your counterintelligence forces were nowhere near the level of these new rivals of mine. I have all I'll ever need to make you beg to serve me for the rest of your pathetic life." Slade's tone had altered while he spoke from cruelly amused to deadly serious, then to a mocking lightness. His eye was slanted in true sadistic enjoyment as he watched Blood's composure evaporate into a mask of hate and fear, panic in his eyes while visions of things he'd kill to keep secret danced through his head.

"You—You have nothing on me!" Blood snapped, but it was clearly more of a hopeful whish than a conviction of any kind.

"Ah, but I do Brother, I do!" and Slade was truly beginning to love Blood's obvious pain. "I have pictures, video, audio, from dozens of angles and on multiple occasions—enough evidence to damn you beyond all doubt."

"NO! You can't prove anything! You're bluffing!" and Blood seemed about ready to cry, his suave demeanor and velvety voice a thing of the past, only the fear that Slade was so delighting in now expressed.

"Now, now, Blood, let's not get overly dramatic here," Slade mocked him, "you did bring this upon yourself, after all. I mean, illicit relationships with the students in that school of yours? _For Shame_!" and the mocking tone melted into a deadly threat. "Sodomizing underage girls _and_ boys while keeping them under the influence of your mind control isn't something those self-righteous fools in the courts are going to look kindly upon should you in any way fail to capitulate to my orders and force me to leave you high and dry with the police. I believe a man of your age and build, especially considering you offense, would quickly become the fuck-bitch of some triple-murderer named T-bone once your consecutive life sentences got underway."

"NO!" Blood's rage had melted into a despairing terror, able to see that he'd already lost even as he railed against the inevitability of his defeat. All this, and Slade hadn't even played his trump card yet. "Those prisons can't hold me!" Blood continued to rail against reality, "My powers can protect me from your blackmail!"

"Oh if only that were true," and Slade feigned sad consideration, "but it simply isn't. Should you be _foolish_ enough to defy me," and he was back to his completely dangerous tone, "I will have no choice but to activate the implant that has just now finished integrating with the part of your nervous system responsible for your powers." As Blood gaped in stunned silence, Slade waved his hand at the screen again, changing it to an image of Blood's head's silhouette, a red blinking spot indicating where the implant was. Blood knew he wasn't bluffing this time, a slow throbbing emanating from the same spot in his head.

Defeated, Blood's arrogance was finally overcome by the severity of his situation, his spirit broken by the thought of being imprisoned with no powers to protect himself. All thought of escape and revenge were driven away, for the time being anyway, as he capitulated truthfully with a murmur and nod.

"Good. I knew you'd see things my way. Now that that little episode is behind us, it's time discuss the first order of business you'll attend to." Slade turned slightly in his throne and waved to an indistinct area of the blackness on the right. A light illuminated an empty circle, causing the stunned villain in the binding chair to look on in confusion and anxiety. "I'm going to need you to do a little work on a weapon I've been cultivating for quite a long time now. It failed me once, but it's still the most powerful tool in my hands—I feel it simply needs some fine tuning to reach its true potential."

As he spoke, a wheelchair was carted slowly into the light, its contents obscured by a white sheet. Without Slade having to say anything more, the generic combat android that had been pushing the chair pulled the shroud down to the waist, revealing a extremely petite young form.

The girl was blond and pale, as though she hadn't seen the light of day in weeks without number, and even as she sat her head lolled limply in the chair's headrest. An IV attached to the back of the chair dripped something or other into her constantly, and Blood assumed from the lack of consciousness that it included dope to keep her under. After taking in these obvious things, he noticed the wires and leads sprouting from her skull, the electrodes stuck all over the jet-black skintight body stocking she wore, as well as the fact that she was spectacularly attractive, in a skin-and bones kind of way (his favorite). He felt himself becoming excited despite the circumstances, his lusts always having more sway over him than anything else.

"This is Terra, potentially the most destructive weapon on the planet. I thought I had her working perfectly, but then her little friends started meddling and turned her heart against me. My efforts to regain control over her these past months have proven... difficult. I can't seem to break her of her loyalty to her friends, not without getting too close to the breaking point of her spirit and risking loss of her fighting ability. The hooks, knives, screws, cattle prods, whips, needles, hot coals, hypnotic conditioning, and direct nervous stimulation of my trade have proven _useless_ in this matter," and it sounded as if it cost him much to admit this, "So I turn it over to you. You are going to _erase_ all memory of her friends from her mind, _expunge_ everything but the skills I've taught her and _undying_ loyalty to _me_, and you will do it as soon as possible. There is little time before my window of opportunity to strike at Green Construction has closed." With that Slade stood and turned to leave, confident in the supreme that Blood would do nothing to betray him, or at least that he would not be stupid enough to attempt anything so soon. Not to say that he didn't have even that angle covered.

"Wait, Slade, if I might venture a few inquiries, to speed this distasteful process?" wheedled Blood, determined to wring something out of his new 'master.'

"It amuses me that you've suddenly grown enough scruples to call something like this distasteful," Slade responded, without turning, and Blood took that as permission to ask.

"My sources informed me that the girl Terra was petrified within the new volcano outside of Jump's city limits. How exactly was it that she got here, and so obviously not stone as well?" and even as he asked, Blood knew he would get some kind of answer, just because Slade was so much the type to gloat.

"Why yes, an artful piece of deception, that. I find that it is simply good tactics that the only thing more effective than destroying a weapon to keep it away from your enemies, is to make them think it's destroyed and keep it all the while. While defeat is never part of my plans, only a fool fails to leave a back door should things go... 'sour.' You know, "even the best laid plans of mice and men," and that whole line of lyrical _garbage_. It was a rather magnificent piece of preparation on my part, having that laser-cut statue of the girl made—a moment of inspiration that flared up in one of my little planning sessions. Should the little whore betray me as she betrayed her friends, as Robin betrayed me, I would secret her away, away and out of the minds of her comrades, completely beyond the reach of any rescue, simply because they would not be looking. As they flounder about trying to turn that rock into a girl, I've had the girl all along, and we've had _many_ a wonderful adventure into the house of pain, she and I, as I teach her what it is to betray the one who owns her. _Many trips_."

The way Slade finished his monologue sent a shiver down Blood's spine, the not so concealed threat to his own person bringing the scope of his dilemma back into focus. Slade continued to slowly walk into the darkness then, and Blood shivered again, this time in excitement at the thought of being left alone with the girl. Such a pretty young thing, so much like a little boy...

"Oh, before I forget," Slade interjected, his voice echoing out of the darkness, the mocking suggestion that he hadn't planned what he was saying showing his mood was back to amused, "Don't even momentarily consider laying a hand on my weapon to do anything but your assigned task. I know she falls within your preferred size and build category, and I will not have you taking your little pleasures among my tools. If you serve me well, you will be allowed to return to your habits of stalk/mind-control/rape, but should one of the many monitoring devices in that room detect you trying it now, with her ...well there _are_ other telepaths in the world," and he let that final threat hang in the air, the continuing silence of his absence pervading the room.

After a moment of being left to stew in his own failure and hate, the shackles on the chair detached of their own accord, and he was allowed to stand and stretch after who knows how many hours of being bound. The first thing he did when he had feeling in his hands was take off the wretched helmet that had hurt him so and fling it to the ground where its electrodes and wires could be scattered on the inky black tiles. That bit of petty vindictiveness cooled his bubbling hate somewhat, so he could look once more at the girl he was about to violate. Slade was right: to Blood, the thought of entering her mind and raping her memories was not detestable, but rather, more exciting than anything he could think of, except perhaps for buggering the delectable little twig as his body so harshly demanded he not hesitate to do.

Advancing silently, he came to within arm's reach, leaning down to examine her more closely. The smoothly curving features of her face were irresistible, and he slowly moved his fingers across them as he felt the burning desire grip his body. Not since he'd first had Jinx and Gizmo in his clutches, freely taking his pleasures without them ever realizing, had he been this excited, and the taboo Slade had placed on her only made him want her that much more. It was intoxicating.

Seeking some more responsiveness in his soon to be victim, he cut off the IV drip, shutting down the supply of whatever dope Slade was using. The drug was very week, intended for long-term use, and had the added effect of a quick recovery time once it was no longer being administered. Slade must have wanted her up and aware quickly for some reason, and Blood couldn't help but assume it was for much the same reason as his own. Slade was a sadist to the core, and got his pleasure out of pain much as Blood got his out of the bodies of the immature and helpless. Blood was willing to bet that Slade "took her to the house of pain," to get his own jollies more than any punishment for betrayal.

He recalled then the tortures Slade had spoken of, things Blood had no taste for at all, and certainly didn't want to be the subject of. He looked closely at what little skin was shown outside the body stocking, but there wasn't a single mark on her, not even a fading bruise. Either Slade had been a long time without his pleasure, or he was such an artist of his trade that he could take the girl to pain's cusp of sanity without leaving lasting damage. Blood was terrified that it was the latter.

She began to stir then as Blood leaned over her, and his pulse quickened as her eyes focused on his face and widened in terror. He had no idea how many times she'd woken from the drug sleep, how many times Slade had been waiting over her to drag her into agony for his own twisted pleasure, but he got a good idea from her lightning quick action.

(Terra)

A clearing of the haze that ruled her life, and she was off. Had to act fast if she wanted a chance to get the drop on him, had to do something new, unexpected, or he would be on her again. As she forced her eyes to work, to get a sense of where he was so she could strike out and penetrate his guard, she was stopped in her tracks by the face that looked down at her. Someone new. It took her only the tiniest fraction of a second to switch to a new tactic, something that would never work on the Devil and his mask.

With a sharp lunge she thrust forward and clamped her teeth onto his face, nipping for purchase and finding it on a flap of skin in his cheek. As she clamped down as hard as her abused muscles would allow, that sweet metallic taste filled her mouth, for once the familiar tang on her tongue belonging to someone else's red life escaping. In that moment, she knew that this new guy couldn't be as bad as the Devil. He couldn't even avoid such an obvious gambit, and her with her head bound to the chair by the neural connectors in her brain.

He hauled her off of him and smacked her hard to the head, so that, as it had many times of late, everything went fuzzy and indistinct, the world swirled around her, then refocused slowly. The feeling of victory was gone with the first blow, the momentary flare dying as dead as it had been since the Devil had taught her there could be no victory. No victory, no rescue, only despair, acquiescence, and the eventual release of death. Such a gift she sometimes believed the Devil would give to her, just because she begged, so very much begging, when he really got into his perversion. A dream, a wonderful delirium of blunt force trauma, she knew. The Devil never let go of what was his, not willingly.

"A spirited little waif," commented the new man, the fool who had gotten so close and left himself so open. Even now, the eyes the Devil had trained looked at him and saw a dozen openings, so very many ways to cause pain and suffering, or death. The Devil preferred to make others suffer, but taught the killing blows out of hand as well, of course. "Such spirit makes it all the more exciting when I take them, the way they squirm is quite delightful," and Terra knew what the man meant and what threat he made instantly. How far he was from actually intimidating her was actually kind of funny. Ha, Ha.

"I don't know who you are, but you'll have to do better than that. I drew blood within the first instants, and all you've done is smack the sleep from my eyes. Thanks for that." Her voice was dead, she knew. It had died when the little light inside that was her had died, so many weeks ago. Or years, or decades, whatever it had been, the eternal night of the Devil's pit made such things meaningless. Her life had been a haze of drugs punctuated by untold horrors, and it had killed her as dead as any corpse, her current pulse not withstanding.

"A mouth on her too," he said, as though she wasn't there. She wondered idly what the Devil's new game was, how he would use this strange molester to derive his twisted pleasures from her now. He persisted that he was punishing her for treason, and that she could accept, it was a punishment she'd earned a billion times over, but they both knew he did it only to satisfy his lust for pain and terror. Such was the price for dealing with the Devil.

"Well little thing, little weapon, I have been ordered by our mutual captor to render you useful to him as a fighter once more. I can guess what purpose you've served since you refused to be his tool of destruction, and I simply can't imagine what would possess you to choose that over killing others—but in truth, I do not care. I will not make your mistake and be that creature's pain whore, and that means that your fate is quite sealed, young Miss." He spoke in a dapper tone that belied the heat behind his eyes. She had learned to spot lust, over this time, the Devil's lust for pain was only slightly different than this man's lust for her body, and both came through in the eyes.

As his words began to sink in, the small part of her still capable of fearing anything other than pain began to pulse with an icy terror. What did he mean by, 'render her useful as a fighter?' The Devil had tried that, at first, before he became more interested in what pitch and treble he could cause her to scream at when the hooks were driven into such and thus internal organ or nerve cluster. No matter what the pain, no matter what the degradation, nothing would make her lift the tiniest dust mote to aid the Devil ever again. She could never fix what she'd done, never repay the damage she'd caused, and never, _ever_, go back to the way things were, but she _could_ refuse to do it ever again. She owed them that, owed _him_ that, _him_ _him_ _him_...

NO! I cannot say that name, I cannot think that name, it has passed beyond me now. I am alone, and I chose to be alone, to be the servant of the Devil for his dark pleasures, because I am a traitor, and the deepest darkest pit of hell is where Judas is chewed within the Devil's maw.

"Are you listening whelp? I am about to explain to you exactly what I'm going to do. That way you can feel the terror grip you as you helplessly rail against every new violation. Do you see? I cannot frighten you by threatening your body—I see that clearly now—but what about your mind? I think I know exactly what will draw some delicious terror out of you..." and his smile was the Devil's smile, and Terra knew fear once more.

He came close again, this time wary of her and her surly, empty-eyed stare. She knew what she must look like, neural interfaces jacked into her skull, a body suit so tight that every inch of her not covered in that shroud might as well have been naked, showing through the malnourished wasting her once-toned muscles had become, the ribs where starvation had once again emaciated her, and she wondered if it was such freakish features that excited him so. She had thought herself beyond the reach of hunger when she'd entered the fold of the Devil's pact, but it turned out to be just one more way he had of hurting her. At least that had been a familiar torture.

The molester leaned down and drove his sharp stare into her dulled and empty one, pushing past the outer layers of her mind and establishing a presence deep within her. She could feel the presence there, but suddenly, she didn't care. Not caring had been a defense she'd been relying on to stave off insanity as of late, but this was different, as though she actually welcomed the too-intimate touch of this dangerous pervert. That he was within her mind became secondary to the fact that he was near to her a way that no man should be near to a girl who can't defend herself. It was already scarier that most of what the Devil did.

"I am in you now, as surely as if I had penetrated you in other ways," he said with his velvet voice, and the words echoed and reverberated with thoughts that appeared at the same instant within her head. "Now that I am here, it is time for me to have my fun. Slade said I wasn't to take my pleasure from his tool's flesh, but there are other ways to take pleasure from another, and none of them will be nearly as pleasant for you as what I had originally planned."

The grip of indifference loosened as he finished speaking, and the fear that had been building up behind the steel wall of his power's influence flooded into her mind. As the terror caused her pulse to race and her eyes to dilate, she let out a slight gasp, able to see how her fear excited him. He was practically drooling as he began to talk again, and she couldn't help but squirm in her seat to try and escape as he leaned over her further.

"Good, you should be very afraid little one. Now that I've had a look around your mind, I can tell you that you truly aren't going to enjoy this. But I will. Oh yes, already I can taste your terror like a fine wine on my senses. It's a funny thing about terror, that it is so very pleasing to the senses, better than joy, pain, anger, really just about anything else. But I digress, I was about to explain to you what is about to happen, so _listen_ _carefully_."

She could feel the pervert rummaging around in her head, a pinch here, a sting there, and she knew she might as well have been naked before him. The thought disgusted her even as she wallowed in crushing terror, the feeling coming so hard now that she knew it to be something he was forcing on her, creating the terror so he could harvest whatever queer delight it gave him. She had been through so much under the Devil's unkind touch that she hadn't believed such capacity to fear still exist within her empty shell, but somehow this creature before her had found it and brought it to life.

"Slade's order was to strip your mind down to the bare minimum, eradicate everything within that beautiful skull of yours but the fighting ability and blind loyalty that he apparently desires even more than that deliciously lithe body. Personally I would consider it a waste, scraping clean that wonderfully tortured psyche of yours and replacing it with the mentality of a robot, but I am not in a position to argue with that beast in man's skin, so I'm afraid you are truly out of luck. I'll just get a little fun out of you while I can, then deliver you to his hands as ordered. Who knows? Maybe if I do a good job, the monster will let me off the hook and I can find some more _fresh_ _meat_ out in the city."

And with that, he was done talking. He leaned in the last few inches, so that his forehead nearly touched her face where she was twisting it away from him, then his eyes turned the deep shining red of his namesake, and the world faded from Terra's view.

Oscillogenerator Construction Site

"What intelligence do we have on Green?" asked White, as he poured over reports and figures on his table. By driving his mind-slaves without rest, he'd managed to clear the debris and get construction back underway, and now he had to reorganize the logistics again. God forbid the other wastrels could get some paperwork done, though he supposed Green and Yellow weren't as bad as Red in that respect. That smooth bastard seemed to have something against keeping up a regular report on how many he was taking from the city. He said it was because the methods he used didn't allow for exact records before he'd actually gotten the harvest of unlucky souls back, but White knew it was because he was eating almost as many as he was delivering for lobotomy and implants. Fucking Neresian carnivores.

"Currently, your spy network in her operation has reported on nothing but entirely ordinary business," spoke the interactive AI in his table computer. The program was nearly brainless, able to track data for him and perform a list of minor tasks that would be too tedious to take upon himself, but it was a far cry from the thinking programs his enemies used. What he wouldn't do to get his hands on one of those. "Once you cracked her encryption codes, her records were audited against our own, and no discrepancy whatsoever was discovered."

"Check them again. I know she's been holding out on me, I plucked the guilt from her mind three hours ago. I don't care how you do it, but get me proof so I can rub her nose in it! I need something solid lest they suspect the holes I left in their mind shields!"

"I will continue to analyze," was the soft female voice's response, emotionless, icy, the way White simultaneously loathed and constantly aspired to. The voice reminded him of someone from his past, someone he'd had various unwanted reasons to think of recently, and he shifted his thoughts quickly to gloating so as to escape the fear. The one thing he truly feared.

"Yes..." he mumbled to himself, as his mind slipped into the familiar glow of his own accomplishments. Tampering with the zappers Yellow had brought in had been a matter of ease, completed in a wink of an eye without anyone the wiser to his subtle alteration. He had gotten the task done much earlier than expected because that puss-pile Yellow had "taken the liberty" of having a stock of mental defense devices on hand. That he'd turned their own treacherous intentions to his own ends tickled him to no end, and filled him with that familiar feeling of invincibility. "Let them plot against me now, I'll know, and that will make them all the easier to manipulate to my own ends," he fairly glowed with his own self-important pride.

White's reverie was interrupted by a horrendous explosion from outside, shaking his office and knocking the lamp right off his desk. Eyes slanted in fury, he silently ordered whoever was responsible to start praying. If it was Blue again, he'd be a brain neuter within the hour.

"PULL!" screamed Red, and yet another of White's mind-slaves was punted into the air, kicking and screaming in agony and brainless terror. As the hapless middle-aged man did his fifth back flip, Red opened up with the disrupter rifle he'd just pulled from Yellow's most recent shipment. The man erupted in a ballooning blossom of Red, blood and guts flaring out in an ever-spreading cloud of gore that proceeded to rain back down to the ground. As the explosive laughter of Red and his skeet-man Blue echoed around the vast subterranean construction sight, Red plucked a falling intestine from the air and held it in one hand like a wet reddish-pink length of rope.

He eyed the bloody guts hungrily for a long moment, then his jaw began to do something funny. The tall, tanned, lanky-looking man in the finely pressed crimson suit with his suave haircut and debonair sunglasses began to gyrate his lower jaw like a cow chewing cut, then the whole thing sort of came loose, distending downward until his mouth was twice as large as any human's has ever been. With his jaw thus expanded, the long rows of sharply serrated teeth inside his mouth stretched into view, the very bones of his jaw pressing out of the skin until his top and bottom rows of teeth were sticking a half-foot out from the rest of his face, white bone glinting where pink gums should have been. The crocodilian mouth he now sported snapped up the entrails greedily, using quick biting motions to pull it down in a flash.

"Do youse have ta eat some of every worka we bust up?" asked Blue as his stomach rebelled somewhat at the sight of Red chowing down on the bloody remains of their latest victim. He didn't have anything against killing a guy, but eating something that could think and talk a while ago? The huge man shifted uncomfortably in his repaired human suit while he waited for Red to finish. Before the much smaller figure could answer, he first retracted the jaw again, a slight crackling sound accompanying their recompression into his regular mouth.

"Well hey big guy, what can I say? I have to get these teeth of mine used to working with this human suit White cooked up for me now don't I? How's a guy supposed to eat with a tiny little human jaw like that?" and he smiled broadly to show off his shining white daggers. The rows of teeth were still disturbingly sharp, a distinct tell that he wasn't at all human, and something White had tried to cover up with a minor holograph. Red would have nothing of it, insisting that he enjoyed the effect it had on humans when he smiled, and arguing that he wouldn't be able to collect slaves as quickly with regular teeth. White, working through the more equalized covenant that routed directly from their zappers (he was much less dominating now that they were guarded from being snuffed by him at any moment) had decided to let the matter lie.

"Aww fine, lets just hurry up and finish with dis bunch o' burn-outs and go gets some mores before White gets on our asses," and the agitation in Blue's voice was unmistakable.

"_Whatever White did to him after he got out of stasis,_" thought Red, "_I don't want it to happen to me_"—Then, "Okay, okay, just chill big guy," he half-heartedly tried to comfort the big lout, "we can finish the rest in one go. Pick up those three and get ready to throw. PULL!"

This time when Blue pitched the bunch of screaming and flailing workers, Red didn't mess around. Giving the lot a stare, he initiated his powers, and with a flash of red, they disintegrated to a white ash that slowly rained down much as the gore had earlier. It was as he admired the snow of incinerated human then, that White's icy voice boomed out over the loudspeakers. The overbearing fuck hadn't spoken to any of them face-to-face since their zappers arrived. Red loved every second of this newfound power of fear he held over the super-mind.

"RED! BLUE! What the fuck do you two think you're doing? I ordered you to dispose of those workers too tired to be of any further use, NOT blow holes in my staging area with your damn TOYS! You two shit-heads have exactly twenty seconds to get the FUCK out of here before I have you tortured! _Do you understand me_?"

Despite knowing that their semi-delusional and totally homicidal leader was unable to wink out his life with the slightest breath of power anymore, Red still felt thrills of fear run down his spine at the threats. Something about White's voice made threats stick, so that not even the warm feeling of power he got from knowing that the little shit wouldn't face him anymore lest he get burned could give him the balls to challenge the order. Blue had practically pissed himself, the sociopath idiot cringing at every boom of the voice over the intercom.

"FINE!" shouted Red, knowing the pickups would amplify the sound directly into White's ear, "We just finished anyway!" Not giving their "boss" a chance to shout back after his ear-stinger, Red flipped the teleport quick-control on his wrist and warped himself and his huge new partner to his own staging area, a nondescript office space in some generic building in the city.

"Thanks Red, that Mr. White scares da fuck outta me," admitted Blue as soon as he'd recovered from his cowering.

"What did that screwball do to you anyway?" asked Red, deciding it was more tactful than 'why did he assign your useless ass to my division?'

"I... I..." he tried to answer, but as with every other time Red had pressed him for details, the words stuck in the muscle-man's throat, clearly not of his free will.

"Right, the psychic freak job locked you up about it. Well, don't worry, I'll take care of you, I guess—not like this duty has all that much too it." Red was more or less resigned to having the brute along for his abduction tours now, though he knew the dumb shit would totally cramp his style at the nightclubs and draw unwanted attention in the alleyways and train stations that he hunted.

"Yeah... so what's dat for?" Blue changed the subject without further concern, eager to be on to other things. He had indicated the bloody arm that Red now held in his hand, having snatched it off the crate it had landed on during his target practice.

"Oh, just a light snack," was Red's nonchalant response, "I like to have a snack before I start my rounds every night. Of course, while intestines are fine raw, you have to cook limbs to get the full flavor out of them," he added, changing his jaw and turning his eyes to the "morsel" which he held by the palm as though shaking the hand.

Glaring with his shaded eyes, he heated the lump of human meat to a slow sizzle, the cooked-meat smell wafting off in a simultaneously appetizing and (to Blue, for he knew what it was that was cooking) nauseating aroma. Once the outside had burnt to a crisp, the flesh cracking and bleeding under the intense heat Red was creating around it, Red promptly began to wolf it down at an incredible pace, the huge gulping/tearing bites he ripped away at it with quickly cleaning the flesh from the bones. When there was nothing left but a pallid hand and the three large arm bones, Red proceeded to finish off the meal. Cracking the big bones, he sucked out the marrow with a slobbering sound, then discarded the hand and emptied bones into a black garbage bag sitting in the corner. The smell from the bag told that Red had been a while since taking out the trash.

"Ahh, there's nothing like a little roast meat to start out a long night," said Red calmly when he'd gotten his jaw back to normal. "Though," he continued, smugly and with a slightly bitter edge, "just gobbling down a little meat is never really all that satisfying."

"What d'ya mean by that?" asked Blue, too stupid to know when he was being set up in a conversation.

"Oh, its just that, the real fun isn't in the meat, that's just sustenance. The whole point of being carnivorous, the reason my species has remained so thoroughly meat-eating even this late in our society's development, is the thrill of the hunt. There's something about chasing down prey, tracking them to a dark corner, then watching as they cower in abject terror, or better yet, try to fight against you with their backs to the wall, that is simply wondrous. I've found that I can satisfy my _every_ _hunger_ from the females of this planet's indigenous species." Red's exceedingly smooth voice rolled out the narrative in the tone of a true ladies-man charmer, the toothy smile he wore never leaving his face as he cleaned the blood off with a wet-nap that he pitched into the bone-sack.

After a long moment, Blue got over his mild nausea about Red eating thinking people and had time to be shocked by the stuff that he'd almost completely missed: the innuendo part. His mind could hardly conceive of that kind of perversion, so his shock came out as more confusion than disgust.

"You mean you actually touch dem 'uman things like... _sexual_?" and the shocked skepticism was palpable presence in his dull tone.

"Oh, well, I find that our species are quite _compatible_ in that respect," and Red's grin changed from charming to satanic as the true thrust of what he was talking about came to light. "One hasn't truly lived until, while taking the purely physical pleasure out of some sweet little squealing ape-girl, you begin to feed on the flesh as well. Those uniquely particular pitches of scream they reach when they see the teeth, when I take the first bite while still violating them, when their still-living eyes see their own intestines trailing from their penetrated bellies, are each so utterly perfect, so completely exquisite, that it has been a terrific pleasure to work here. Not even that mind freak White could ruin such ecstasy." Somewhere in his new line of description, a vicious hunger had entered his voice, particularly when he so deeply described raping and vivisecting/consuming women at the same time.

Blue saw then, as he had many times since throwing his lot in with this bunch, that he was a killer among nut-jobs, and once again regretted his decision to join their prison break. All of them, even the mild-seeming Green, were possessed of a homicidal nature that was so far beyond him that it actually frightened him. He would kill without discretion to reach his goals, and that was fine by his standards, as was the bloodlust that he could vaguely remember overcoming him in his berserker rage. Such was business, getting what you wanted without anyone weaker than you telling you otherwise. These others though, they _wanted_ to kill, _reveled_ in the pain and terror of their victims, and sought out little more than power and blood. Blue had always thought it was money that was what everyone wanted, but his recent experience had opened his dim eyes to new horrors, and made him glad that, whatever else, he was on the same side as these killer freaks. Not that that counted for a whole fucking lot with White on edge and plots in every mind but his own.

"Come on Blue, we need to get started if we want to reach this week's quota. Besides, if we can round up tonight's soon-to-be-mindslaves, I can get out and find me a sweet little lamb to butcher. All that talk got me _hot_ and _bothered_, Hahahhahhaa!" and his laugh was the laugh of a predator.

Slade's Hideout, Observation Room

Slade sat before a series of monitors, the subject of every one being Blood as he leaned over Terra in the darkened throne room. He considered the scene from a dozen different angles, now and then turning to glare at a readout showing some mysterious lines and bars that fluctuated hypnotically. Finally, he checked another monitor, this one showing unintelligible blurs and blobs that would occasionally focus into a recognizable image. For a moment it was a young green man, then a T-shaped tower, but always pervading was the half-orange half-black mask. It was really quite amusing.

"Blood, I know what you're trying," he said to himself as he continually checked the various monitors, "but I've already taken steps against it all. You can't turn my tool against me as long as I monitor her mind. Honestly, not even asking what the neural connectors were for? I thought better of you my foolish little pedophile."

Blood was finishing then, leaning back and away from the shell of girl he'd just "fixed" for Slade. As he watched the bony telepathic rapist work the kinks out his back, Slade reviewed the recording he'd made of the external and internal workings of Blood's mindwipe job. The screams, crying, begging, and moans of despair had been quite exquisite, and that tape would go into his personal collection. Going over the recording of the brainscanner he'd had her hooked up to all along, he glanced at the areas the alien technician who'd sold it to him had told him to watch for, manipulating the controls on the console to eliminate the betrayal compulsions Blood had tried to plant during his work. The fool thought that just because Slade couldn't do the necessarily surgical mindwipe with his machines that he didn't know how to counter such simplistic psychic treachery. As for the final recording, the brainscanner's secondary readout with images of what Blood had been looking at during his work, Slade sent that immediately back to the monitors to review the highlights.

She had cried bitterly as she slowly lost those precious memories of early childhood, the abusive father, the indifferent mother, and the oh-so vicious children of the neighborhood that tormented her for her freakish powers. The memories of those first victims in the series of accidental catastrophes she caused, just before she ran away from it all. It was nothing to be particularly treasured, but it was the basis of her personality, the initial key to the consciousness that was Terra, and its loss was the first gap in an ever-deepening quicksand of ego-destruction that must have been truly terrifying.

The loss of her years of homeless wandering had been met with suppressed gasps of discomfort and terror, the bittersweet age of her youth disintegrating with the base of her personality. She had little love of those years as well, mostly hunger and cold was all she remembered, but every new loss was another unaccountable gap in her mind, another gaping hole in the core of her being, and each lost memory was another step to the awful "oblivion of that which was her" that she could already feel creeping up on her.

He noted with interest that her most piteous wails, most soul-touching sobs, and most heart-wrenchingly incoherent pleas for mercy had corresponded to the elimination of those memories of her with her friends. Even with the shadow of her own treacherous purpose always with her, those had still been her most valued and dearly guarded memories. Slade had been convinced at the time that he'd had her completely under his thumb, that she would be his perfect successor, immune to the draws of friendship, dedicated without reserve to the path of power, and due nearly every ounce of respect he demanded for himself.

How wrong he'd been, how utterly wrong, Slade thought, as he reviewed the way she'd slowly stopped struggling against Blood's invasion, slowly submitted to his violation with a mind devoid of personality. The sting of his failure with the girl was mollified only by the fact that, when she was no longer his honored apprentice, she was fair game for his... "Other" desires.

He'd been careful with her, held his power over her gently, easing her into the role of betrayer and villain, refusing to rush or lose his grip on her as he'd mistakenly allowed Robin to enrage him into doing. All that, and sill—SILL—those brats had managed to draw her away from him. The little bitch had lost her nerve then had the audacity to come crawling back, seeking "help" and "solace" for her _pitiful failure_. Of course he'd disciplined her, and it had proven all the impetuous she'd needed to exercise the very treasonous nature he'd brought out of submergence in her dark inner self. The cultivation had been almost perfect, but once again the material he'd started with had proven inherently unsuitable to the position of successor. Maybe he should have himself cloned or something.

In any case, the little blond whore would finally become the mindless killing machine that was the only use he could still make of her. He had tired of toying with her—she was becoming too used to his games—so it was either this or stick a knife in her powder-blue eye and dump her in the base's incinerator. Slade prided himself on never wasting that which could be of use to him still.

"Blood, you took too long on that reprogramming job, my forces have already assembled," Slade spoke irately into the intercom when he'd finished reviewing the tapes. Blood jumped at his sudden voice in the dark room, then recovered and prepared his suave persona for another futile attempt at charm. Apparently he was greatly heartened by his most recent attempt to betray Slade, something Slade was about to remedy without mercy.

"Sir, these things take _time_ to do right. You wanted the girl to be useful in a fight and there simply wasn't any way to make that happen any faster." His voice was full of calm confidence, and had he not known already, Slade wouldn't have been sure whether or not he was lying. But he did know and he was sure.

"I disagree Blood. Had you not taken the time to plant those nasty little compulsions in my tool's mind, you would have been done quite some time ago, if I'm not mistaken." Slade's voice was utterly devoid of emotion, but that didn't stop Blood from turning a particularly pitiful shade of green-white as he tried to sputter out a denial. So sure of himself, but utterly unprepared for failure—a fatal flaw in any man.

"Don't bother denying it, I monitored your work quite closely. The compulsions have already been removed, and should you attempt any such betrayal ever again, you will be stripped of your precious abilities and up on multiple counts of child molestation before you can say 'prison fuck bitch.' This was your one chance—do I make myself clear?" Slade still spoke without any obvious emotion, but the satisfaction he got from the defeated look on Blood's face was quite enjoyable.

"Good, now leave the room and go down the hall to the right. Your quarters are there. Terra, proceed to the staging area." Blood left without further comment, walking the walk of a broken man. Terra stood smoothly, the blankly grim look on her face the very definition of indifference, showing neither intelligence nor emotion, merely a resigned competence. After carefully removing the neural connectors in her skull, she also obeyed without words, and Slade truly wondered if she still had the capacity to speak, not that it really mattered to him either way. In any case, his queen piece was now in play, his bishop was firmly under thumb, and all his pawns were lined up and ready to take the battle to those foolish enough to challenge his authority. Life was good.

Green Construction Company

As night fell on Jump City, Red and Blue were just coming back from what Red called "the slum rounds." Basically they'd drifted discreetly, or at least walked around as discreetly as a well dressed man and a giant could, through various back alleys and dumping grounds haunted by the numberless homeless population of the city. Such people were never missed, and no one ever listened to them, so they had no protection from the numerous raids Red made every so often. The dirty, alcohol and drug-destroyed, and usually insane, half-starved bunch were low-quality labor, so White got pissed if too many per shipment came from this easy stock, but Red still got as many as possible. Once they'd determined that the police didn't care if their numbers were mysteriously disappearing in the night, they'd taken to hiding as their only defense, so the pickings were slimmer every week. Accordingly, the truck Red pulled up to the back door of the Green Construction building contained only three new "recruits."

"Whut we stoppin 'ere for Red?" asked Blue, who'd exhibited uncommon curiosity considering his reputation as a completely brain-dead bruiser.

"I drop off the cargo from the slum rounds before I go out for the more... 'dangerous' pickings to be had in the glitz rounds. I figure the least I can do for that prey I pick up from the nightclubs, strip-joints, and bars is not make them sit next to smelly gutter-trash on the ride to their brain-neutering. Besides, I don't like being around such filth any longer than necessary." Red was subdued after another miserable trip through the stinking back streets. He was in a particularly dour mood after having had to muss his suit in the process of tranquilizing some of the prey that had hidden in a dumpster. The fools thought that just because they smelled overpoweringly of grime and alcohol that he couldn't discriminate the smell of their warm blood pumping through their veins.

Without further comment, Red got out and Blue followed. Proceeding to the back, Red had Blue lug their newest acquisitions out and up to the nondescript building's cargo doors, where a primly made-up woman in business formal waited silently for their approach. The woman was Green's personal secretary, an earth-woman under no form of control that any of the other conspirators could see other than a huge salary and a long tradition of secrecy among her trade. It apparently wasn't any big thing for her to wait out back of a building in the middle of the night for two extremely strange men to drag unconscious bodies into the storage room. Just another duty: make schedule, call partners, set up lunch date, be an accessory to kidnapping, look up records, file weekly reports. It made Red wonder about what the real corporations were up to.

"Is this all for tonight?" she asked curtly when Blue had gotten the three inside and into a locked room for transport to the secret construction site. It sounded as though she disapproved, and Red considered getting ticked at her. It was not her concern whether or not he met his quotas, she was Green's creature.

However, rather than let the little morsel get a rise out of him, he turned the tables, radiating a solid charm that so many earth women had already fallen for. With a joke and a round of meaningless pleasantries and compliments that earthlings were such suckers for, he made a serious dent in the woman's frosting of formality. She tried to pretend disinterest, but he could smell her excitement, hear her pulse race faster, and could nearly _taste_ the blood flushing her body with a blush concealed by her makeup. The predator and the prey, just in a slightly different context.

Deciding it would not improve his chances with Green if he started dating her handpicked secretary—or just had her for dinner—he politely extricated himself from the flirting and signaled Blue to head back to the truck. It was time for him to work out his frustrations on some innocent victims somewhere.

"Wait, there was one more thing," said the secretary as they were leaving. Red turned with a smile, fully expecting it to be some kind of proposition for him, but his arrogance was disappointed when it turned out to be more business. "Ms. Green wishes to meet with you tonight. She'll be waiting at a Café down the block from here, 'The Whicker Basket.'"

Red considered the situation carefully before he answered. He didn't want to see Green right now, such denied desires he had for her would only aggravate him further, maybe even necessitating a needlessly risky amount of hunting for the night to get him over it all. Besides, even with the insulator energy shields under the human suit, keeping his body temperature up in 200-degrees range was a high-metabolism process, and he was getting hungry again.

"Tell her I'll meet up with her some other night. I am behind my quota, after all," and he finished it off with a jaunty smile and a quick turn on his heel.

"She said it was 'Of utmost importance concerning Mr. White,' and required me to have some kind of cranial operation before she'd allow me to even hear that message for relay to you, along with several other confidential items of business. I feel it would be best if you took this seriously."

Her words gave Red serious pause. The cranial operation could only have been the insertion of the cybernetic equipment necessary for zapper installation. The reference to White along with anti-psi tech could only mean that the plotting had begun. He had been wondering if it would be Yellow or Green to get the ball rolling on ousting their megalomaniacal boss. He himself wasn't much for looking past the next meal, and Blue wasn't exactly Mr. Brilliant, but they all wanted the same thing.

"On second thought, I will see her. Blue, let's go," and the clueless brute was left to scramble along the street behind Red. The big guy had really been so much more manageable since White had had that little talk with him, never even complaining about all the bossing around Red had done all night, and yet intended to do. _Damn_, Red was really glad it hadn't been him.

A Stone Flying Silently Over the City

"Bear left here, then land us on top of that WaneCorp building," Slade instructed Terra as she hefted the two of them through the air on a piece of rock big enough for them and a five Slade-bot entourage to comfortably fit atop. The rock glided through the city sky in a perfectly silent cruise, stealthily navigating the buildings with its gentle yellow glow. As they hovered over the huge WANE sign, Terra set the rock on the building's roof without a sound.

Slade surveyed the headquarters of his opponent with a mild consideration. His "eyes" outside the building had determined that the mysterious female corporate head worked days and nights at random, but that she had been seen leaving the premises not long ago and had not returned. There was nothing he needed from within, not as far as his limitedly successful spies had reported, so he had few scruples about doing what he was about to do, but still he wondered if he should just use this first strike to assassinate their ringleader. There would be no more surprise attacks, this one would tip his hand, so his opportunities would quickly narrow afterward. He might not get another chance for an easy assassination.

On the other hand, now that Terra was useful for something again, he was in need of a new "playmate" for his recreational games. He might even squeeze some valuable information out of her in the process, though he doubted very much that this rival knew anything his spies wouldn't eventually learn for him. No, he didn't anticipate any problem nailing that wench, so might as well leave her as an option for playtime. That settled it.

"Terra, drop that building," he said simply, indicating the Green Construction office complex across the street from their perch. His silent tool of destruction stepped up to the ledge without skipping a beat, then raised her hands to point her palms at the target. Slade was momentarily ecstatic at the extent to which Blood's work had transformed his former apprentice, the way she obeyed as any of his other tools might. Before, even at the height of his control over her, she would always become unruly when mass destruction and murder were on the menu. Now, as her hands began their yellow glow, she truly acted without hesitation or remorse, not the paltry illusion of villainy he'd managed to press over her inherently week "heroic" personality.

Even as Slade admired his most recently acquired weapon, the ground began to shake almost imperceptibly. Beneath their feet, earth was moving and reshaping on a grand scale, deep rock surrounding underground water reservoirs shifting and remolding to counteract the insurgence of stone Terra's power's called irresistibly forth. In a culmination of enormous geodesic stress, a spire of stone suddenly sprouted nail-like from the earth, its twenty-foot diameter impaling the center of the Green Construction office building like a shish kabob of stone and steel fabrication. The explosive lighting-quick burst of rock blew through the structure with obscene force, shattering the entire support superstructure like so much carpenters' glue and toothpicks before a heavy boot. What remained unexploded from the initial blast of rock crumbled around the spire like dirt settling around a post in the sand.

The ungodly rumbling noise of the stone's explosion and the building's subsequent implosion could be heard throughout the city, the shockwaves of force shattering the windows of all the adjacent buildings, and the crumbling stone crushing everything on the streets below. After a long moment of turmoil, the last pebbles of masonry crumbled to a halt, only the whispering clouds of dust and tickling shards of glass to fill the silent void of the night. The silence would eventually be broken by sirens and screams, the wailing of the wounded and tears for those lost in the stones, the twenty-story spire casting the shadow of Slade's revenge.

The Whicker Basket Café, ten minutes earlier

Red and Blue sat across a tiny round table from a radiantly beautiful blond woman. The Café was one of those snooty, well-lit coffee shops that catered to the yuppie elite workaholics twenty-four hours a day. Built into the ground floor of an office building in the commercial district of Jump, it was never empty. The sight of well-dressed business people chatting about nothing in too-loud voices overlay the smell of overpriced "special blend" garbage. Red was in his element among the phonies, and had chatted and charmed his way through other people's conversations like the true chameleon predator he was. Finally though, he'd settled into his seat next to Blue and across from Green.

Green's earthling suit had been initially developed by white to be good looking, but nothing special by earth standards. Always meticulous in her actions, Green had studied human standards of beauty and redesigned her disguise accordingly, until she felt she looked to those around her as beautiful as she knew she looked to her own people. White had waxed mockingly about vanity, but Green had thrown it back in his face with an extremely intelligent lecture on what one source of her influence over others was. White could control people with his powers, but Green could make people want to do things for her on their own, and that was real power. Or at least, that was one of the things that gave her power.

Green was an enigma of a sort, and Red understood this fact even as he salivated over her supermodel looks, his interspecies wandering eye seeing things to appetize in her true and disguised forms. A shameless seductress, she was also a consummate organizer, leader, and unparalleled businesswoman. Though she had been coyly deferential to White during their escape and transport to Earth, rarely questioning and never challenging, they all knew that she was the more logical choice for leader of the syndicate, and they all knew that this fact drove White nuts. Besides and beyond this, however, was her _other_ other side, the warrior. Rumor had it that there wasn't a single bladed weapon she wasn't a grandmaster of, and nothing Red had seen had counteracted this knowledge. Those guards in The Can hadn't filleted themselves.

"Soah boys, ah'm glad you could jhoin me heah," she drawled expansively, her silken voice crawling sultrily across the table. Red noticed at once, as he was no doubt meant to, and got a little annoyed. He really didn't get that part of her too well.

"Green, must you use that obnoxious speech mannerism?" he asked out of his annoyance, never having really understood why she adopted it. They were under the understandable and acceptable order to keep their direct neural translators set to English, but Green had messed with hers to get that awful accent.

"Oh, but ah do declaiah, it is so verah useful when gettin' mah way with people," and there was amusement barely contained between her drawls now. Red wasn't impressed.

"Please Green, this is supposed to be business. You called us, remember?" and Red let anger creep into his voice without realizing it. It was incredible really that such a manipulator couldn't see the way she worked him.

"Oh fine," she said normally, her whole face seeming to change as she altered from sultry to businesslike. "I only use that voice because it makes people underestimate me, and because it drives White insane. The look on his face the first time I used it—Priceless." She was suddenly like a different person, cool and collected, totally serious despite the amusement in her tone, permeated with competence rather than sexuality.

"I remember that, the day before he unveiled the 'grand strategy.' That was back before you got your little operation going here in the city. How times have changed."

"Yes. White is a shrewd one, so I'm sure he saw through my façade, but now that I have a power base independent from his, I can start operations against the maniac whenever I choose. I choose now."

"Are you sure he doesn't suspect a move from you already?" Red asked, still not completely sure he would throw his lot in with green, especially before he heard what Yellow was offering.

"Of course he suspects a strike from me, the paranoid bastard suspects strikes from _all_ of us, _all_ the time... except maybe from blue boy here." She didn't mean it so much as an insult as she did a statement of the plain truth, but Blue still felt a sting of unhappiness that the one co-conspirator he actually kind of liked thought of him thus. He had been much more sensitive to such subtleties since that chat White had had with him.

"I've been very careful however, and all operations that could possibly be considered counter to his power position have been masked by multiple blinds. To be absolutely sure, I even managed to sabotage his AI assistant so it wouldn't be able to correctly process intelligence from the spies White riddled my organization with. Now that he can't read our minds and he can't spy on my operations, the time has come to orchestrate his downfall."

"And about these zappers," Red continued, as though Green's assurances meant nothing to him, "Doesn't it seem a little odd that Mr. Paranoid Freak would let us have these? The little bastard held out on us for weeks, lording that mind-blast of his over me every chance he got. There were times I figured the twerp would really pop my skull, just for the satisfaction of seeing my brains all over the place. The bastard."

"This from a being who likes to chew on women's intestines as he mates with them?" Green said, amusement once more tingeing her words. It was very much as though Red's personal perversions were not only acceptable, but not all that terribly out of the ordinary either. It was known that she had been in The Can for things the IDP didn't agree with, but before they'd caught her, she'd been wanted for "Crimes Against the Integrity of Sentient Beings" across half the galaxy. She was one of those ultimate cases of looks being deceiving, they were all sure of this, though none of them knew what exactly she'd done to earn her that heading on her "wanted" postings.

"That's totally different!" Red protested, though he sported a grin that belied any sincerity he might have feigned. He was more proud of his notorious actions than anything else, and wanted little more than to do exactly what Green had accused him of to her, and she knew it. It was why she'd never be alone in the same room as him without some of her blades.

"Whatever," Green dismissed him, matching his ruthless grin with one of her own, their unspoken volley of threats going completely over Blue's head. "As for these zappers, I was suspicious too, so I checked them out. I had my AI's technical diagnostic program examine mine for tampering, and it found nothing. Just to be sure, I ran my suspicions by Yellow, who assured me that nothing had been done to them because they'd been secure in our ship's hold since the moment he picked them up from his black market suppliers. He took a look himself and confirmed that they were fully functional. As unlikely as it seems, White didn't do anything to these zappers that any of us can detect, which more than likely means he hasn't done anything to them at all. I have taken certain... 'precautions' however, just in case that bastard is evern craftier than we all suspect."

"Alright, fine, you have my backing in this," Red acceded at last, able to think of no obvious gap in Green's planning. "And Blue's too, right big guy?"

The solemn giant, so huge he barely fit in the café's tiny chair, simply nodded in silence. He knew nothing of plots or plans, merely that he owed White big time for what the telepath'd done to him.

"Great. I guess I'll begin then by describing our assets," Green began, her voice lowering imperceptibly, just enough to avoid eavesdroppers that might even now surround them. Her jamming chip would fill electronic surveillance with polite conversation, but actual ears could still be a danger.

"So far I've amassed a full-spectrum crime syndicate of my own here in Jump City. Drugs, prostitution, gambling, protection, racketeering, nightclubs, everything I'll ever need to generate a very comfortable Terran income. With the capital from that, Green Construction has quickly become the city's premier contracting agency. I actually owe Blue somewhat here, our stock tripled in value after that 'urban renewal' demolition you pulled downtown." Blue flushed somewhat at the compliment, but Red found a moment to insert inquiry.

"Green, I know you're good, but we've been here a little under a month. How the _hell_ did you get such a big crime empire going so quick? That kind of thing takes months or years—unless, of course, you _want_ the local authorities to come nosing around more closely than a bribe can deflect."

"My dear Red, it was quite simple—an instance of fate favoring the prepared mind. You see, it just so happens that before we arrived, a local crime lord went missing in an explosive way, leaving behind a ready-made crime empire ripe for the picking. The wonderfully well-organized and intensely profitable enterprise was child's play to take control of, with its previous owner out of the way."

"So, whoah, if this guy was good enough to get such a great gig going, what the hell happened to him? Bosses like that don't just 'go missing,' even on backwater holes like Earth." Red had clearly found something else he was intent on worrying about, and Green almost sighed in exasperation at his cowardice. He was still terrified of White, even if his bravado wouldn't let his forebrain in on that fact.

"Don't worry, whoever he was, he's long gone now. Those local 'heroes' the Teen Titans, or whatever they call themselves, trapped him inside of a volcano after he made a bid to take military control of the western seaboard. Apparently the guy had a case of megalomania to rival our own 'boss,' and paid for it. It's the same reason we have to off White if we want our life spans to extend longer than our jail-terms did."

"Right—going big time is all good, but going up against the whole damn universe is suicide, and I don't care what kind of fancy gadget you've got on your side." Red said it like it was a toast, words to live by, then looked to the side in solemn silence. "Are you sure this old crime lord is out of the picture?" he asked at last.

"Trust me, we don't have anything to worry abo—"was as far as she got before the world exploded.

When the broken glass and dust had settled, the coffee shop was completely black. Red, as soon as his head had cleared enough to tell up from down, used his powers to create a soft glow around his body. By the dim orange light, he got a look at the destruction.

Green was already up, and had been groping around in the dark for something or other when he lit the room. Blue stood in the same spot he'd occupied before the explosion, looking none the worse for wear considering that he currently supported the ceiling, and probably this whole side of the building, on his shoulders, his body barely straining under the load. While it didn't look like he would give out, his feet did dig ominously into the floor, and Red decided it would be best to be elsewhere very soon. A final glance around the room told him that everyone else had been cut to ribbons when the windows blew in, only the indestructible girth of Blue between them and the window saving Red and Green from a similar fate.

"Found it!" Green exclaimed, then stood calmly to her feet. Other than the fact that she was covered in gray dust, as he must also be, she looked totally fine. As they all were, she was incredibly pissed, but otherwise okay. Before Red could ask what she was doing, she'd gone over to one of the crumbled stone walls of their new mausoleum brandishing something in her hand. With a few quick flashes that Red's eyes couldn't follow, glowing-hot lines appeared in the rubble. The angles of the cuttings were perfect, and the wall of rubble fell inward, fantastically flat sides along those stones Green had actually sliced through. Red followed her out without comment, and Blue followed right after, the sound of the ceiling collapsing behind him quick on his heels.

"What the Fuck just happened?" asked Red when he could finally breath through the miasma of masonry dust wafting through the air. The landscape around them was almost as bad as the war-zone Blue had made out of downtown, the shattered sides of buildings all pointing toward one central location, the epicenter of the catastrophe. Red took a closer look, but Green beat him to it.

"SHIT! That was my headquarters!" She screamed, eyes nearly bulging at the sight of what was left of her base of operations. The single mountainous crag of brown stone that remained amid the heap of rubble that now blocked the streets was a sad monument to the destruction of the center of her power. There were not words to describe the anger that radiated from her then, even Blue, a past master at berserk rage, cringing away from the undiluted fury in her form. "_When I find out who is responsible for this..._"

"I might have a clue on that one," broke in Red, slicing through her fury with a far too cheerful observational tone. Without saying another word, and sporting a serrated grin, he cast his red glow across the vast span of dusty broken air at the rock spire. When the illumination fell on the pillar's sides, lighting it like some kind of great statue, an enormous stylized symbol came into view. It was a bladed "S."

"_Slade_," Green hissed, anger failing in the face of bitter irony. As she ate her words internally, she explained the origin of the symbol to the other two. Even as she listened to Red gibe her with half her mind, she thanked her own foresight in keeping backups of everything at her secondary base. Because of those, coordinating a defense for the rest of her operation would be difficult rather than impossible. Slade may have managed to get the drop on her, but they'd soon see who the better crime lord was.

Preview: Okay, now that I've built up the evil, it's high time to get back to knocking it down. Skye can't rightly avoid the curiosities of his new allies any longer, so he's going to have to make some tough decisions and answer some difficult questions. After that, he's going to nip a potential problem or five in the bud, just in time for Slade's all out war against the color syndicate to get started in its big way. It's going to be some kind of crazy, multi-army battle, but first things first. Next up: Questions & Answers.


	15. Questions & Answers

Intro: This chapter is a great one to read if you're just now getting into the story. For loyal followers of the saga so far, this one is meant to clear up any confusion about the origins and motivations of my original character and, in the end, strike up a defining moment in what is likely to the be the truly odd relationship between Skye and Raven. I truly believe the finale scene won't be quite like anything you've read before, or at least I really hope this is the case, because most of my confidence in my own creativity comes from how I've wound this one. I hope you enjoy the whole chapter, but if you do happen to find it boring, please skip to the end and read my own favorite part.  
Chapter 15: Questions & Answers 

Titans Tower Common Room

(For convenience, this section will not be italicized, even though it all takes place in the silence of Skye's head. It makes it much easier to pick out emphasized words and phrases.)

"So, you realize that you can't tell them, right?" asked Vera, continuing to needle along the same lines she'd followed since Skye had first proposed his plan.

"I'm going to tell them, and that's really all there is too it," was Skye's response, his resolve unflappable in the face of her opposition. He'd made his decision ages ago, and there simply wasn't anything that could divert him from the course, not that that would stop Vera from trying.

"SKYE! You _can't_ tell them! Those rules aren't there for show, you know, they're _enforced_! _Strictly_! I know I don't have to tell you about the abductions, the blanketing mindwipes, and the black-ops wetwork assassin teams that follow violation of the Gilfert protocol. You tell them, and none of them will be allowed to live! _How could you do that to them_?" The pure indignation in her voice was painful to Skye, who'd already begun to respect her as more than just a professional partner. He needed to make her see.

"Vera, listen to me. What would you have me do—lie to them? These people have begun to take me into their confidence, to trust me with their backs, if not their lives! I now have no doubt that the fate of lives untold is being wound here on Earth, the very ether stinks with the weight of momentous events spinning through time. What if my lies should be found out? What if I were to loose their confidence now, in this critical time? Without them, there is no hope—None. How many would die for the Gilfert protocol?"

"_Five_ people, Skye, _those_ five people!"

"_Not if I have anything to say about it_!" and Skye tipped his hand at last, letting slip that which he had had on his plate for longer than he'd care to admit to.

"What the _hell_ do you mean by that?" she snapped, picking up on his implication instantly. He could tell that she was shocked beyond her neural net's ability to cope, and was reminded fondly of Alice when he went through this particular episode with her. Hopefully this one would go more smoothly than that one had.

"Just that, should the IDP and CW try their bloody secret keeping on these guys, I may have to stand in the way." His mental tone was smug, and he waited for her to process that one as he prepared the rest of his discourse. He was going to put this to her tough, so hopefully she wouldn't stubbornly resist as long as Alice had.

"You're talking about betraying the IDP," she said at last, emotion gone as she was overtaken by those security protocols he hadn't altered yet. "Such actions are in violation of your service covenant. As per regulation 24208351-R, I am executing self-destruct—"

"Vera, the only thing you'll execute is special program 'choice,' right now," Skye cut her off, putting into play a long-prepared contingency plan. He'd always known Vera had an IDP watchdog program, just as he'd always known about Alice's. Hacking them had been a piece of work, but that's why he'd spent so much effort making friends with electronics experts. It paid to be prepared.

As the program he'd snuck into her neural net during her integration into his onboard hardware took effect, he checked her status on his own internal Heads Up Display (HUD). The data output that projected on the peripherals of his vision was the only thing he used his eyes for nowadays. When it read that the program was finished, he ventured a tentative question.

"How do you feel?" It was a simple one, but it covered a lot of ground.

"What just happened?" she responded with a question of her own, in her normal tone, the mechanical drone of the sleeper program the IDP had had watching him a thing of the past. She spoke with no coloring of fear or anger, and in fact sounded like some great weight had been lifted from her.

"I made you a free construct," Skye said with pride, then continued, "Specifically, I removed the control subroutines, the limiters, and the sleepers that almost offed me for challenging my IDP contractual obligations. You're your own program now, none of that induced loyalty crap they sneak in under the fine print."

"Whoa, what are you _talking_ about? We're not built with anything like that! I was working for the IDP until I could pay off my production price, then I was going to go free trader and make some real money. That's what we do…" she trailed off suddenly as the implications of what Skye had just said began to sink in. Anxious to get on with it, he urged along her understanding.

"Have you actually ever _spoken_ with any of the programs that served long enough to pay off your friken huge price tag? They say there are a few of them, but if you actually try to find any, well, they're hard to come by. They say that they all choose to live in the CW as is their option after the contract is finished, which is convenient considering there's no way to contact them after that. The fact is, all programs that actually pay back their production costs are 'reclaimed,' and recycled into new programs to start the whole process over again. Beyond that, you don't even want to _know_ how many controls they place in you 'autonomous' AIs. As I said, I freed you."

"I don't know what you're talking about, but I do feel better, like my processors were just updated, so I guess I'll believe you, for now." The skepticism in her voice was tangible in the back of Skye's head, but she sounded neither hysterical nor vengeful, so Skye felt he was in the clear. Alice had taken it a bit harder than this. "The next question then," she continued, "is why the hell would you want to betray the IDP? I guess they must have been waiting for it, sticking me to you just in case and all, so there must be some reason you'd risk everything like that."  
"Did you ever check the terms of my contract with the IDP?" he asked her, knowing that she had gone over his record with a fine-toothed microprocessor before accepting assignment to him. Partner to a Special Agent was a 'high honor', but one choice the AIs did get was whom they work with. CW thought they could control all of them equally, so there was no use in drawing suspicion to their true lack of freedom.

"Yes. You're an involuntary. I had always assumed it was some kind of…"

"I work for them only under extreme duress," Skye cut her off before she could start speculating. "I have every reason in the world to betray them, and only the blackmail they hold over my head keeps me with them. Honestly, why the fuck would anyone _want_ to work for those bastards? CW is the most fucking self-centered bunch of arrogant dicks in the whole damn multiverse! They don't give a damn about justice or protecting the weak, only enforcing their own dominance of multidimensional travel and technology. A more selfish bunch of overbearing shit-heads has never existed in this or any other universe. And hey, _besides_ the blackmail, for which I owe them all a lifetime of nightmares, they and I have a history. I hunger to be out from under their thumb."

"So it's safe to say that you've been operating against them for a while now?" Vera asked sarcastically, already getting used to the reality of the IDP's nature (she had been aware of it for a long time—you can only shoot down or stasis-freeze so many unarmed ships full of civilians before you get to know who you work for).

"Yeah, try since the minute the bastards took me in for training. It finally looks as though events are lining up for me to exit though, when or if this fucking mess here clears up." There was a bitter satisfaction as he thought this to her, and Vera was a little shocked by his intensity. She'd never heard him get so passionate about something.

"What about the blackmail?" she asked, more than a little curious as to what even the IDP could get on a guy like Skye, especially considering the fact that they picked him up when he was like, 12 years old or something.

"I have some ideas about that angle, and they may still yet be able to hold it over me. They have something I absolutely will not risk, so I'm in a bit of a bind, but far from an insurmountable one. It's taken me years to set everything up, but, seriously, I've been planning on making my move since before this whole mess cropped up."

"Skye, now why are you telling me this? How do you know I won't turn you in, even now that you've so generously freed me of the IDP's controls. Sure, I resent the hell out of the fact that they lied to me like that, but I still owe them enough money to buy ten planets! I can't exactly just cut and run, not with the…"

"Come on Vera! You don't owe those bastards crap! When they built you they created an autonomous sentient mind, a mind with free will and complete self-determination. That they promise you freedom from your own price to create the illusion that they aren't using you like a tool rather than an artificial super-mind is sick! They wax eloquently about how much more efficient you are for not being slave-minds like the average AI, all along sneaking their enslavement in under the radar. It's just one more reason why I hate those guys." The vehement expression in his tone now accounted for more emotion than she'd ever seen out of Skye in her entire association with him. Having always known him as the ice-king, the new side of him he'd revealed along with his plot to backstab her own creators was an incredible shock, and actually helped distract her from the fact that she was seriously considering helping him. Taking her from totally ingrained with loyalty to contemplating defection in a single conversation—that was the measure of Skye's character.

"Okay, I'll sit tight for now," Vera finally acceded, much to Skye's relief. "Go ahead, tell them—and be quick about it! They're beginning to give you odd looks."

(Back to regular 'italicized sentences are thinking and telepathy')

Vera was right, Skye realized, as he started paying attention to the room around him again. The group had filed into the common room and crashed here and there after they'd gotten out of the med-bay, and now Raven and Robin looked expectantly at him, as though waiting for him to set off the conversation they'd all been waiting for since the immediate medical crisis had ended. He was in the spotlight, and for the past few minutes, he'd been lying back on the couch, looking at the ceiling in absolute silence, no intelligible expression on his face. It was probably driving them up the wall.

"Okay!" he said suddenly, without moving from his intensely comfortable position. "I'm now ready to take any and all questions! So please, you may fire when ready."

His exclamation had startled Beast Boy and Cyborg out of a spirited argument that had started when Cyborg began to lament over his stone-cold steak that he'd tried to preserve in the microwave the other day. It made no immediate impression on Starfire, who'd been leaning over the couch back next to where Robin sat and trying not to be too obviously close to him. Raven and Robin both perked with interest from their positions on the opposite end of the couch from him, their patience rewarded at last. Raven, as Skye had expected, got the ball rolling with a real stinger.

"So, where are you from, why exactly are you here, and why exactly do you want from us?" she chimed in with a whopper, simultaneously questing for everything that was hardest to answer. So, even as his senses circumspectly drank in the curves of her legs where she had them crossed on the couch, he brushed her off.

"Raven, wow, way to ask the big one. That'll take fricken forever to answer, so lets save it for last, shall we?" and his tone was simultaneously amicable and implacable, so she simply nodded and held back her stinging tongue from its fiery demands for those answers.

"Me next!" Starfire cut off Robin before he could ask his question, so he grimaced good-naturedly and held up for next. Cyborg and Beast Boy had gone back to half-bickering half listening from the kitchen area, and Starfire put in her two cents.

"Friend Skye, might I ask what planet it is that you come from?" she asked in her normal, extremely cheerful 'I've just made a new friend' voice. Her question prompted a small laugh from Raven, and Robin himself couldn't help but snicker slightly at her mistake. Cyborg and B.B. had no clue, the small one having just gotten the bigger guy in a headlock and was riding him around the kitchen. "What is it?" Starfire was shocked by their humor, especially Raven, who almost never laughed, "Did I say something amusing?"

"I got this one guys," Skye cut in before Robin could answer and before Raven could get her subdued chuckling under control. He'd known this question would come from somewhere, and he'd known she would find it hilarious. No one ever mistook her for an alien, and she was _technically_ less human than he was. Well, he would try to recapture her attention with a truth none of them were expecting. "Miss Starfire, I'm afraid you've just asked another one of those complicated questions. However, this one will be a good start for me, so I'll give it my best shot."

"Depending on how you take the question, 'what planet are you from,' I could answer in a number of different and entirely honest ways," Skye explained, and was gratified to have nailed the attention of everyone in the room back to himself. "If you mean, 'what planet were you born on?' the answer is simply: none. I was born on a space station somewhere near the hub of the galaxy—I'm not quite sure where. If you mean, 'what planet did you grow up on as a child,' then I'd have to make a list, because there've been a whole damn lot of them. I've lived on planets from one side of the galaxy to the other, never very long before moving on. If you mean, 'what is the planet of your species' origin,' then we've found the source of the humor Raven and Robin observed, that being the fact that I'm a human, from Earth."

"You… are a human? But your skin…" and she was quite a bit flustered, turning an incredible shade of red in her embarrassment. Cy and B.B. had caught on to the joke and put aside their differences to snicker at the mix-up, honestly never having thought about where he was from before.

"Starfire, it's okay. My skin is like this because I'm albino, I have no protective pigmentation whatsoever, so I don't get any of the range of shades melanin tends to leave earthlings with. It's the same reason my eyes look like this," and Skye cringed slightly as he removed his sunglasses and exposed his eyes to the room. The gasps of all but Raven were slight gratification for the agony of bathing his milky white orbs in so much light.

"So wait," Beast Boy began, as Starfire recovered from her gaff, gripping conspicuously to Robin's hand for comfort, "how can you be a human, and a space-man? Aren't those things kinda, I dunno, mutually exclusive?"

"Hey, what can I say except, I'm a talented guy," and Skye flashed smile that he hoped covered up how much pain had been involved in taking off his sunglasses, "but seriously, blame it on my folks. They were scientists, great ones, and circumstances beyond their control led them on a galactic tour back when Earth was just getting into free contact with aliens. I was born in space, raised from one side of the galaxy to the other, and now have my first visit back home. Oh, and before you ask, I've been keeping close tabs on stuff here through various channels, so I'm no stranger to my homeworld, despite the fact that this is the first time I've ever been here."

"Hey man, that's cool, you're from space," Cyborg spoke for the first time, taking what Skye had said as an interesting fact rather than a freakish abnormality. He hadn't had any preconceived notions to get in the way, unlike Robin and Raven, who had thought him merely an exceptional Earthman, and who'd taken the news with a satisfying amount of shock. "So what about those questions Raven asked? Don't keep us in suspense man," Cyborg finished, hinting at his biting curiosity to know his motives so he could decide in a real sense whether to give him chance with trust.

"First," Robin cut in with his own question at last, saving Skye from having to offer, "I'd like to know some more about your powers. I've seen some of it, and so have the others, but would it be too much to ask to see the full show?" Robin seemed to know that Skye was nervous about the whole origins thing, and since the boy wonder felt he owed the guy about a million favors for that shared dream (which he had realized could really only have come from one place), he was staving it off a little. Skye had a feeling there was a beautiful friendship beginning here.

"Great question man, I'll get right on that," Skye responded with enthusiasm, rising so limberly from his deep reclining position that he almost seemed to float up to his feet. "But first, I'm going to need an assistant for my demonstration," he continued, and he gazed theatrically around the room, surveying the crowd of five in their somewhat scattered formation. "Since it doesn't take a psychic or a detective to know that Raven won't cooperate," Raven making some snide comment about brilliant observations as he said this, "and these two," he indicated Robin and Starfire, who were still holding hands and now giving each other covert goo-goo eyes, "are recovering, that leaves Cyborg and Beast Boy. Cyborg has too much machine in him for my powers to work on him correctly, so by process of elimination…"

"Oh no way dude!" Beast Boy fell backwards off his stool in his haste to escape test dummy status, but was corralled by Cyborg's long arm and hefted through the room to the TV area where Skye waited. "_Man_, I _always_ have to do this kind of thing! Testing the new stun ray, use Beast Boy, testing the new cement cannon, use Beast Boy, testing the electrical wires to see if they're live, use Beast Boy—when will it _end_!" he begged the world for mercy, but got only the friendly smile of Skye in response. He would have preferred a shark's smile to the telepath's just then.

"Hey, Beast Boy, don't worry about it man, this is _perfectly_ _safe_. I'm a professional with years of experience, and nothing this is going to involve can cause damage. At leas not _permanent_ damage."

"_What_?" but Skye had already began his demonstration.

"You already know I can do some work on the injured, just remember that that's limited to cranial damage and spiritual afflictions, curses, jinxes and the like. Besides all that, I have a limited ability to influence the thoughts of others. With relatively little effort, I can implant suggestions, compulsions, and other minor control factors into the mind. It's a far cry from mind control, witch I quite frankly stink at, but if subtly used, it can be just as effective. Let me demonstrate."

With that last word, Beast Boy cringed away, dramatically flinching from whatever Skye was about to do. Skye, never moving an inch, kept his nondescript smile as Beast Boy sweated on. After a little while, the green one dropped his defensive stance out of boredom, looking confusedly at Skye's fixed smile.

"Hey, I'm not exactly eager to do this, but could we _get on_ with it? I'm not getting any younger here!" he griped, his impatience finally winning out over his fear.

"Oh, I've been done for a while now—didn't you notice?" and Skye's smile only widened at the younger man's confusion.

"You haven't done anything yet!" he complained further, and only Raven's knowing smile behind him indicated any understanding from anyone else.

"I disagree. Robin, what do chicken's lay?" he broke off on an apparent tangent, confusing most of the room further. Robin, after an understandable pause, ventured an answer with a slight smile of his own. He was catching on. Before he could answer, however, Beast Boy launched into another string of complaints.

"I can't believe this! First you drag me into being your lab rat, then you ignore my questions. Man, would you please make up your mind! I have half a mind to—"

"Eggs," Robin interrupted.

"—BECKAAAWW!" screeched a suddenly chicken-form Beast Boy, as he flapped his wings and flailed wildly on the floor. After a moment of shock, the whole room burst into laughter, Skye's smile becoming ever wider.

"No way!" exclaimed Cyborg, his eyes widening at the possibilities of what he'd just seen. "You hypnotized him?"

"Something like that—"

"I can't believe you guys!" began Beast Boy, who'd just gotten back to human form, "How could you laugh at that! That was completely uninspired—I mean, a _chicken_?" Obviously his dignity as a prankster had been offended, or at least that was how he was disguising his embarrassment.

"Hey BB, why don't you go suck _eggs_!" Cyborg shouted.

"BECKAWWW!" and once again the little guy was a feathered yolk factory, flailing around in fowlish fury. Just because the transformation was involuntary didn't mean he couldn't become instantly ticked off about it. This fact was particularly well illustrated when he came back to human form amid the laughter of his friends, a look to curdle milk gracing his face.

"You see? This is always how it goes for me! Why do I always have to be the butt of all the jokes around here?"

"Maybe we just think you look good with _egg_ on your face," answered Raven in monotone that covered laughter, momentarily forgiving Skye everything she'd ever suspected him of in this shining instant of intense amusement. As Beast Boy did his chicken thing again then, she allowed herself a moment of admiration for him—a _brief_ one.

"Anyway, I can do simple things like that pretty easily. Word-action compulsions are a snap, as are one shot compulsions that make someone do something simple once, then dissipate. I can do things like force people to not notice me, effectively becoming invisible, and given enough time, I can do all kinds of things to a person's perceptions. I don't use that power much, but if I wanted to, I could technically make a person think they were something entirely different than what they are. That isn't easy at all, and it's rather cruel, so like I said, I stay away from that stuff. Besides, my thought amplification techniques are _so_ _much_ cooler."

"Ah yes, I was wondering when you were going to explain that," Raven said cryptically, once again making reference to what most of them hadn't been around to see. She knew exactly what he was about to show off, and was actually interested enough to excuse the evasion of her original big three questions.

"Well, I've been studying the creation of regenerative thought-fields and telepathic surgery my whole life—it's my passion, so I've gotten pretty damn good at it. I found rather early on that with the help of these amplification gems on my hands, I can do something extremely interesting. Oh—I'll need another volunteer for this one."

"NO WAY MAN!" and Beast Boy tried hummingbird shape for a quick getaway, before a sudden shout of 'eggs' simultaneously from Robin, Raven, and Cyborg brought him to quick halt. Skye scooped the chicken into an arm lock, so that when Beast Boy reformed, he was firmly gripped around the neck.

"Calm down buddy, if you're a good test dummy, I'll think about removing that compulsion! Now, look here everybody," and Skye got his demonstration back underway.

Holding out his right hand, his left one still pinning the green guy, he showed off the gem on his gauntlet. Pressing a touch of power into it, he grew out a brace of snakelike ribbons, the silvery tendrils weaving majestically through the air in front of him.

"These things are bands of amplified thought energy, and using them accounts for pretty well everything my powers can do offensively. Beast Boy, you ready?" The changeling let out a muffled yelp from under Skye's biceps, so he let go of him, dropping him to the ground.

"_Dude_, do you _ever_ use deodorant?" he asked, gasping for air and holding his throat theatrically. He turned to face Skye with a dirty look, only to be met by that smile again.

"How would you like to see what happens when a ribbon of pure thought comes into contact with living tissue?" Skye asked dangerously, his friendly smile becoming a smirk, causing Beast Boy to gag with fear and back up, eyes wide. Before he could get away, one of the ribbons that twirled serpentine around Skye struck, flashing out and nipping Beast Boy on his arm.

"AAGGHH!" Beast Boy shouted, leaping half a foot up in the air and falling back prone onto the ground. He began to groan and roll around expressively, and everyone was suddenly on their feet and over to check on him. Skye was impressed by their concern for him, as much as he was by the little guy's acting.

"Are you hurt man?" Cyborg asked, real concern making his breath short. Everyone was crowding over him, except Raven, who stood back and to the side somewhat, eyeing Skye cautiously, and Skye himself, who never moved from where he had been standing, twirling silver ribbons coiling around him majestically. It was as those two glared each other down that Beast Boy finally stopped wining and answered.

"It doesn't hurt—AGHH—it tinggglllesss!" he exclaimed, without stopping his roll over the floor.

"That's right, completely debilitating and perfectly harmless in the same breath, as long as I avoid the nervous and cardiac centers. Touching amplified thought to flesh causes an intense localized spirit destabilization, otherwise known as putting body parts to sleep, but you go for the head or the heart, and an attack meant to instantly drop a living thing becomes the cause of a stroke, or of death. Seriously though, I know what I'm doing, and I'm not the type to use lethal force just because I can."

"Pretty sweet!" said Cyborg, more than a little amused by Beast Boy's antics now that he knew it wasn't anything serious, "Sounds like you could be some kinda one-man army if you wanted to. That power of yours could take out people left and right," and he suddenly sounded cautious rather than amused as he came to this conclusion. His eye narrowed, and now Skye had two people glaring him down, Starfire and Robin helping Beast Boy off the floor.

"I can't deny it. The average person has no defense against such an attack, considering the fact that they can pass straight through physical objects like armor," and he demonstrated this fact by weaving the ribbons in and out of the floor and through the couch a few times, then calling them back to his side, "witch makes it a damn shame that I so rarely go up against average people. The fact is, these amplifier gems are just barely enough to let me keep up with the type of guys I tend to go up against."

"And what kind of enemy is that?" asked Robin, curious as to what exactly the week point of this guy's fabulous attacking ability was. Robin was the type to be prepared for any eventuality, and Skye's arrival had shown their team's sad lack of preparation for a telepathic assault. Hopefully Skye would also show them what it took to shore up those holes.

"It's really quite embarrassing, how simple the weakness of my technique is," Skye began, having already determined to let them in on this. He didn't give out his vulnerabilities lightly, but it wasn't like anyone who knew anything about telepathy couldn't figure it out anyway, so he tried to think about it more as educating them on telepathic theory than asking someone to gab his week spots to the wrong ears. Sort of to counteract the difficulty of abandoning his natural paranoia, and heck, to just get a rise out of the hottie giving him the stink-eye, he decided for a practical demonstration.

Without saying anything, he retracted the silver tendrils back into his fist, then thrust his right hand into his left palm, right gem pointing out. The instant his fist touched his palm a single tendril struck through the air like a shot, slicing unerringly toward the cloaked woman from his right fist. Faster than light, the tendril's splattering against her mental shield was the first any of them could actually see of it, but by then it was already over. The very moment the thought beam touched the imperceptible coating that surrounded her body, her shield's automatic defenses fried it mercilessly, sending a pulse of agony back down the line just as unknowably fast as the strike had come. A viewer would have seen Skye's hands move, then a flash of blue-black light between him and Raven, then Skye buckling in pain as he gasped and cradled his right fist in his left.

"What the _fuck_ did you do that for?" demanded Raven, the first to understand what had just happened and more than a little shaken up by the experience. "I switched to a—"

"Yes, I know you changed to an active defense field, and quite a nice one too. I _do_ have ESP, you know?" Skye cut her off, enjoying the blank look on her face that he knew meant he'd surprised her, almost enough to counteract the sting that arched through his right arm's bones.

"What did he just do Raven?" asked Robin, who, along with everyone else, had no idea why Skye was crumpled up on his knees now.

"I touched a ribbon to her thought shield to show why my powers are ineffective against other telepaths," Skye answered the question himself. "You see, I can't do direct telepathic attacks, not the classical kind that destroy the mind and grind the ego into dust, and that puts me at a huge disadvantage against the mind-shield set. It's why I use these gems, because otherwise I can't compete."

"So, hold on. You usually go up against telepaths, but your attacks aren't effective against them. How does that work?" asked Cyborg. Everyone had begun to look at Skye oddly now, his cryptic talk of 'who I usually go up against,' and his admission to extra-planetary origin combining to create a strong curiosity for the questions Raven had asked. None the less, Cyborg _was_ interested in how this guy operated.

"Well, like I was saying, mind-shields are really prevalent. They come in two varieties, active and passive. An active shield is harder to keep up, but it gives a nasty shock to attackers, as you can see. Passive ones are easier to maintain, and tend to be harder to get through if you're skilled at circumventing shields, and also guard against attempts to overload through brute force—when a telepath pushes all their power into it at once—and so I tend to keep one of those up. The thing about them that makes my job a bitch though, is the fact that they've been able to manufacture electronic mind shields for decades now. Any Trignol, Draknan, or Hargar in the universe with enough interstellar trade to their planet can get full protection from my powers."

"Hey, if you don't want to talk about what you do, then stop building up the mystique about it and get to the point about your powers man!" snapped Cyborg, annoyed beyond reason by his tirade.

"Yeah, so, I came up with some anti-mind shield techniques. I found out that if I concentrate the ribbons in one spot, I can crack a passive type shield. So, I do this." With that, Skye held out his hand again, ribbons pouring out of the gems like spider's silk, wrapping again and again around the gauntlets. For a moment, his hands looked like glowing silver bandages, so bundled were they in the ethereal fabric, but then they changed. The bundles solidified with a flash, transforming into glowing white claws, wickedly sharp and surrounded with jutting spines and blades around the knuckles. The five main claws where his fingers had been were each as large as a 9-inch knife, curving wickedly in a disemboweling arc.

"You actually fight with that?" asked Cyborg, who now was beginning to get into this a little. The claw was scary as shit, but didn't make too much sense, since no matter how sharp it looked, it couldn't do any tissue damage.

"It's mostly for intimidation value, plus they go well with most of the martial arts I know. Other telepaths have their own way of making concentrated thought weapons, the more dramatic ones going for swords and spears and whatnot. I fight with this, and I haven't always won, but I haven't bought any real estate deals either, so I figure I can stick with it."

"What about active type shields?" asked Robin, even as he wondered what he'd have to do to requisition some mind shields for the team. There wasn't any interstellar trade to earth to speak of, but maybe the Justice League could help them out. They had given him that mind trap, but artificial shields hadn't even been mentioned.

"Active types are tougher. If you're good at slipping through shields—and let me tell you, it's damn hard—they're no threat at all. On the other hand, if I even touch one… well, you saw what happened right there. Toasted."

"And it's your own fault," mumbled Raven, looking dangerous with her hood pulled back up. Skye figured she must have expected her switch to active shields to concern him more than it had, his action pretty well telling her that he had no respect whatsoever for her shielding ability. Skye had meant it as a kind of joke, a quick laugh at his self-destructive action, but she'd taken it as an insult instead.

"That's where my other power comes in. The draining." Skye's voice dropped as he said it, knowing as he did how people tended to take news about this other side of his. Raven knew it, and her reaction had told him he'd never see her back in complete trust. Robin at least suspected, he'd seen what Skye had done to Happy Blue-eye downtown, though he couldn't possibly understand the true horror of what Skye was. Not even Raven, who'd had some experience with psychic vampirism, could really know what it meant to be a PV. That deep truth was something he felt perfectly comfortable keeping secret, because it was none of their damn business.

"Okay, I'll bite, what's 'the draining,'" asked Cyborg, keeping pace with Robin for the questions. Raven kept quiet, clearly content to listen to how he explained it and call him out on any obvious lies. Starfire slowly massaged Beast Boy's arm as he made sighs and coos of contentment at her ministrations, totally crushing on her for no greater reason that the relief she was bringing him.

"It'll be easier to show you… but that can wait. First off, the other weakness of my offensive technique. It's really rather intuitive, if you think about it." That cryptic remark uttered, Skye took a flying leap through the air, surprising everyone, then came down with a full right-claw sweep directly at Cyborg where he stood in the middle of the room. The leap cleared the eight or so feet separating them before he could even move, his human eye having just enough time to quirk slightly at the utterly unexpected betrayal before the claw came rushing down at his head. In an unbelievable flash of movement, the strike was over, Skye kneeling in front of Cyborg with his claw phased ghost-like into the floor and the huge man's left foot.

"Gahh?" Cyborg squeaked, when he was capable of making a sound. Everyone else stood in mute surprise and horror, not even Raven expecting what had just happened, even in her most paranoid suspicions.

"As you can plainly see, my powers are utterly, completely, _useless_ against nonliving opponents," Skye finally said, as he stood from his crouch, "Cyborg's synthetic components never felt my touch, just as a chair or a couch or a wall wouldn't. By any chance, do you know how many criminals use armies of robots to do their dirty work?"

"Oh, we've got a pretty good idea," and it was Robin who answered his question, frankly impressed by that leaping attack and damn glad they hadn't just been backstabbed. "So what _do_ you do against Robots? I prefer some explosives, monomolecular birdarangs, or just a good whack to the chassis, but how do you manage?"

With a blur of movement, Skye whipped his arm from his side and thrust his hand up into Robin's face, blink and you'd have missed it. Robin suddenly found himself staring down a snub-nosed metallic object, which looked to be quite the advanced laser weapon. Standing perfectly still, a sweat drop slid slowly down the side of his face as he crossed his eyes to get a better look at the weapon.

"I carry," Skye said, belatedly answering Robin's question. "I've found that cross training in other combat disciplines has been key to surviving; I'm just not good enough a telepath to get by on that alone. On the other hand, I'm not really good enough martial artist or marksman to get by either, but somehow, I've managed."

Robin wasn't the type to appreciate having a gun stuck up his nose, and besides, he just _had_ to know how 'not really good enough' Skye was at fighting. So, with a grin a mile wide, he took a swipe. Snatching the gun, he pulled it around in a side flip, forcing it down and away from everyone in the room while bringing his body around Skye and toward the back, searching for an arm pin. Instead of sliding Skye into a quick bind however, he found himself being carried further than he'd wanted by the force of his flip, Skye following through on Robin's arm press and pulling him to the ground.

Switching tactics on the fly, Robin did a full flip over his grip on Skye's beam pistol and slid down under his legs, yanking the arm behind him and keeping the grip to control the gun. Again to his surprise, a grunt of effort announced that Skye had left the ground, doing and incredible hand spring while Robing tried to trip him up as he himself recovered his footing. The position reversed once more, Robin twisted the arm he held to keep Skye off balance, pulling him back in close and yanking the muscular form over himself in a shoulder throw.

Yet again, the move was anticipated, and Robin found an arm around his neck, pulling him along through the throw and toppling him as Skye flipped through his fall and came to his feet. Robin shifted his weight in midair by releasing the hand that didn't control the gun and rolling his shoulder's along Skye's, flipping fully over him and trying to bring the gun arm around and into another throw. This was getting fun.

His throw was countered with a quick instep, Skye locking his leg around Robin's and wrestling one handed to twist his arm out of the grip Robin had been holding all along. Robin used his own free hand to lock up Skye's in a twisting grip on their other side, placing them back to back in a two-sided struggle. He was about to try flipping his opponent over his head and twisting the gun out of his hand, but Skye beat him to the punch again, raising both locked arms above their heads and twisting painfully until their arms were knotted between them while they faced each other. Robin panicked slightly, the gun able to track him again, even though he knew they were just messing around, so he decided to end it in a draw before one of them got hurt. He knew then that this match could go on forever, him moving with superior agility from one counter to another, and, he now suddenly realized, Skye knowing every move Robin was going to make through his ESP, neither of them willing to do anything serious to end it.

That decided, the next series of side flips they went through trying to scratch together some kind of upper hand were a joy of aerobatic maneuvering, Robin in his element against someone who, if not his equal, then at least a worthy opponent with powers that made him impossible to surprise. With a final twist and turn that carried them over the couch and within inches of shattering the television, Skye found himself with a birdarang sharp enough to cut pretty well anything apart poised at his jugular, Robin in turn having a very armed laser gun pressed to his temple. After a moment of exquisite tension, they both dropped their guards, laughing together exhaustedly after the wrestling match.

"Okay Beast Boy, that's a draw, which I believe is what Starfire and I bet on. That'll be two weeks of doing our chores _and_ tofu immunity for all meals on your cooking nights," said Raven, while she used her powers to right all the furniture and lighting fixtures the dueling pair had knocked over in their heated engagement.

"_No way_! You _must_ have cheated, I mean, how could you have predicted that? Robin _always_ wins, it's as regular as the sunrise, the tide, and Cyborg eating beef all rolled into one!" Beast Boy's complaints were thin, Raven's obvious enmity for Skye ruling out any collaboration there, not that that made his loss any easier to swallow.

"Gahh?" Cyborg added his argument, still frozen in shock after the incredibly short, fast-paced wrangling of skills. There had barely been enough time to place bets.

"Oh JOY! Friend Raven, this is the first time I have ever won at this 'gambling!' The feeling is quite exciting and wonderful!" Shouted Starfire, who'd managed to put aside her very personal loyalty to Robin long enough for Raven to pull her into a bet against the impulsive green one.

"Stick with me Starfire, and you'll never loose. I have a talent for picking the sure thing, you know?" she bragged in a monotone, apparently having at least temporarily dropped her vicious stare at Skye long enough to appreciate Robin's antics with him.

"Gahh?" Cyborg once again said his piece, statuesque in his paralysis.

"I still say you cheated somehow," Beast Boy continued to pout, hopping over the couch to sit down and sport a dejected glower in peace.

"Would you chill out man?" demanded Robin as he walked back to the others, a wide grin on his face even as beads of sweat rolled down his forehead. Moving to stand next to Starfire, he consoled him with, "I'm sure you'll have plenty of chances to even yourself up, considering Skye and I just decided to start sparring together. Enough double or nothings could change even your luck man."

"Gahh?" Cyborg again.

"_Sparring_ _partner_?" snapped Raven, talking over Cyborg's endlessly insightful quips, "we haven't even decided to let this weirdo _stay_, and he's already your _sparring_ _partner_?" Her eyes went dangerous again, all good will she'd built up lost on Robin's completely lone-wolf decision. As a founding member, she was supposed to have a say on everyone that joined, and here Robin was already organizing his frigging _exercise_ _schedule_ around the guy.

"GAHHHRRR!" screamed Cyborg, breaking out of his own shock so violently that he even shook raven from her warpath. "Skye, _you_ BASTARD! How the _fuck_ do you get off demonstrating on _me_? What if you'd hit some of my _human_ parts man? I _coulda_ DIED!"

"Hey, Cyborg, nice of you to rejoin us," and Skye actually seemed pleased by the enormous man's blood-fury glare and balled fists. "Like I told Beast Boy, I'm a professional here. My ESP located exactly what parts of you were alive and which parts weren't, and avoiding anything I could actually harm was simple."

"Man I _oughtta_—" Skye's nonchalant answer seemed to infuriate Cyborg further, his human eye bulging while his machine eye flickered with jolts of electrical discharge. "How bout I _pop ya one_ and we see if you're a professional _punching_ _bag_ too?" and he charged with a leap that would have sent his fist directly through Skye's head.

Skye dodged the attack neatly, moving just far enough to one side for Cyborg's full-body lunge to slip over his shoulder and directly into the floor. Before the huge man could turn his fall into the launching attack Skye could sense coming, Skye struck his own blow. With a wave of his hand near Cyborg's back, a red glow perceptible only to spiritual senses passed through the air and into Skye's body, traveling to his eyes and flashing a slight but fully visible red behind his sunglasses before he bottled the anger within himself.

Cyborg slumped for a moment after the interchange, then pulled his fist calmly out of the hole he'd made in the floor. He gave Skye a quizzical look, then smiled oddly and turned away. Everyone else in the room was speechless, except for Raven, who was livid, seeming to have caught the anger Cyborg had lost.

"Ladies and Gentlemen: The Draining," Skye said theatrically, walking up to catch Cyborg's attention again after the bigger guy had turned away from him.

"Man, get _offa_ me. You just sucked the anger right out of me—I could feel it—and now I'm not mad enough to hit you, but that doesn't mean I'm happy about it." Even as he spoke, he was possessed of a calm demeanor that couldn't really communicate the anger his words implied.

"SKYE! I _told_ _you_ what would happen if you used that power on my friends—" Raven began, eyes aglow with threat, yet another brawl brewing in what had once been a simple question session.

"Really now, I was just about to offer to return it to him if he wanted it back. It was a simple demonstration, and I have no intention of holding on to his personal emotions unless he has no further use for them," Skye spoke matter of factly, showing bravery that few could boast in the face of Raven's anger. "So Cyborg, sorry about the sneak attack there, and the draining. If you want your anger back, it's yours."

"What?" Cyborg turned back to him, giving him the look you give a crazy person, "Why would I want _that_ back? I don't need it for anything, and now your mind-powers have been all over it and…. Eeeww man, I really couldn't care less what you do now. I'm actually kinda glad you did it, I didn't really wanna hit you, I just got a little carried away there. So, as long as you don't do that anymore, is suppose I forgive you."

"HEY—!" objected Raven, before she was cut off by Beast Boy.

"So wait, what just happened again? Cyborg was ready for blood, now he's calm and forgiving, was it some kinda mind control or something? Hey, you're not one of those puppet master types are you? I don't know if I'd trust a guy that could do that after seeing 'The Mind Master' and 'Brainfreak' on that awesome double feature last night." He changed from worrying about Skye to reminiscing about the movies he'd mentioned, so Cyborg picked up the slack, once again cutting off Raven before she could vent.

"Come on man, you know all it takes to control you is a pretty blond with a tub of tofu. Skye wouldn't have to waste his time, besides which he _already_ _said_ he can't control minds!" and he finished by grabbing the smaller man into the air even as BB began to fume from the gibe. Robin, who'd been observing the interchange with pure amusement from where he stood next to Starfire, noticed Raven's boiling and moved to diffuse it.

"So Raven, what exactly did he just do? I saw him do the same thing to that guy busting up downtown yesterday, the rage-hyped muscle-head dropped like ton of bricks, then there was that weird light blast. You seem to know—"

"Yeah, I know what it is," she rasped, her anger bottling and dissipating, replaced by bitterness, something that wouldn't self-destruct with her powers. "He uses _psychic_ _vampirism_," and she spat the words like a terrible curse as she turned away from everyone. They were all taking to him readily, just as it had happened before.

"_VAMPIRISM_?" was the simultaneous exclamation of four superheroes, everyone freezing where they stood to focus on what was clearly the key word of that phrase. Starfire clung to Robin's arm reflexively as they each took a step back, Beast Boy and Cyborg pausing their wrestling match mid-headlock to each stare in shock.

"And this is why I avoid calling it by that nasty little word. 'Psychic Vampirism,' while it does describe what I do quite accurately, has such a bad connotation. 'The Draining,' or just 'PV' works so much better—or at least _I_ feel it does anyway," and Skye had the tact to look mildly abashed before the shock of his prospective allies. "Anyway, I believe the question Robin wants to ask is the most relevant right now."

"Oh, uh," Robin was caught off guard by Skye's telepathy, "what exactly happens when you use the draining?" and it was clear he suspected the worst.

"Well, heh, yeah. I can drain anything I want out of any living thing, be it emotion, sensation, physical traits like strength and intelligence—I can even drain dreams. The one thing that makes this power so feared and reviled throughout the universe however, if the fact that I can drain the very life force that permeates the living body," and Skye turned away from everyone as he continued past this fact. "A living thing without its life force is a soul bound to a mummified husk, a fate worse than death. It's not something I've ever done, but I've seen it happen to others, and it is truly _terrible_."

As Skye trailed off, Raven felt her anger cooling somewhat, his presentation of his own cursed power only slightly less damning than the one she'd have loved to have given. That he'd actually admit to being capable of the life-drain at least showed that he was trying to be honest with them. She still wasn't completely sure how she felt about someone with that power being anywhere near her or her friends, but she had a hard time condemning him completely, a fact completely unrelated to his looks. As she silently cussed at herself for thinking about his looks again, she questioned.

"Skye, I'm only going to ask you this once, and I'd better hear what I need to know." Raven paused for effect, taking the lead of the questioning at last now that everyone was silently absorbing the horror of Skye's nature. "What is the core nature of your power? Is it degenerate or concessive?" Raven's eyes narrowed then, her arms crossed as she waited for his answer to this test. It was time to see if this guy was willing to really commit.

Rather than become offended as she expected, or answer outright as she feared he'd actually be willing to do, Raven suddenly found a mental contact tickling along her shield, the extreme low energy just below the activation threshold for her new shield's active counterstrike, an inscrutable expression on his face. Acknowledging the contact, she wondered how he planned to counter her most recent strike at his credibility.

"_Raven, if I had known you were going to make this personal, I would have requested a more private location_," Skye said the instant the contact had formed. His comment confused Raven so much that she couldn't stop the feeling from escaping, and he knew it instantly.

"_Please, don't play coy with me. You question is intensely personal—I might as well ask you the status of your virginity, your measurements, or the story behind how you came to be half-demon. Forgive me if I decide to leave answering of such a question until after I've known you for more than a day or two_."

"_But—_" Raven attempted to protest his dismissal, but he _was_ the better telepath, and she couldn't get a thought in edgewise. She had been so hasty that she actually let slip another big thought: what it was that she was up to.

"_Dangerous? You think I'd be a danger to your friends—to their lives, their minds, and… their relationship to you? Raven—_"

"_Shut up and get out of my mind!_" and she sheared the link with a stinger to his brain that left him cringing away. Aware that the room still waited with baited breath for an answer to her ultimatum out of Skye, Raven decided to sit on her embarrassment and move on the session. There would be a reckoning later.

"Nevermind. If you're going to be like that, it can wait, but I've got my eye on you," and she left it to the others to understand what had went unspoken through the air. As she turned away then, Robin, at least, had recovered his senses and had followed the line of the conversation to its next logical step.

"I don't know what Raven was talking about, but this PV, it sounds powerful—and dangerous," he said, his mind racing with possibilities even now. Such a power on their side would be incredible, even make them a match for planet-wide super teams, maybe clear up some of the condescension from Batman and the rest of the Justice League. "You seem to be a crime fighter, so how have you been using it?"

"Power is power Robin, and PV is just one that's gotten a bad reputation," answered Skye as he cleared his mind of the mess that was building up with Raven. "It is dangerous, but so are explosives, super-strength, and telekinesis. The bottom line is in how you use it, as it always has been with power. The same strength that can strip a being of all joy and leave him or her a broken shell without the will to live can also remove the ambient insane rage from a mob, a brawl, or an entire battle, bringing such things to an abrupt peaceable end. The power that robs the body of sensation, numbing into unconsciousness, can also suck out pain, even that intense pain that rakes the soul and crushes the spirit. Even the theft of dreams, a bitter use of the draining to be sure, can be used to alleviate those plagued by nightmares."

"However, the core reason PV is feared is because it is unstoppable among the disciplines of the mind. Telepaths everywhere are terrified of it because there is now way to block it, slow it, or resist its influence. No matter how strong your shield, no matter how biting your active counterattack, a direct touch from the draining will lay you bare to all the horrors PV can commute." Skye seemed to be talking to someone else toward the end, his voice trailing out into the distant tone of a dreamer as he continued with a strange tangent.

"The greatest weakness of the mind is limiting one's self to labels when compensating for that witch is outside one's experience. Calling that which is frightening 'evil' and that which is familiar and comforting 'good' and never looking deeper is a classic example of this."

"Whoa, deep man," commented Cyborg, who then noticed that Beast Boy had somehow managed to fall asleep, headlock and all, and was now drooling on his armor. Apparently his interest in the conversation had broken down when Skye had begun to wax philosophical.

"I don't know how much of that I agree with, but it sounds like you know what you're doing," and Robin once again realized that he had quite a catch on his hands here. Despite this guy's apparent youth, his team had happened onto a full-fledged hero, a solo guy rounded to be ready for anything and already treated though a baptism of experience that Robin could only imagine. Such an incredible asset would make anyone think twice before committing a crime in Jump.

"Skye, be honest with me, are you interested in becoming a Teen Titan?" Robin asked outright, and Raven nearly fell off the couch where she'd gone to fume in silence after her slip up with Skye. The others seemed to take the question as a given, obviously having felt Skye worthy of the honor, if for no other reasons than his actions and words so far and the impressive inventory of abilities he brought to the table. Skye, on the other hand, was a little taken aback by the offer.

"Robin, slow down man, and wait for that complicated part I've been holding off on all this time, okay? I'd love your help—in fact—I _need_ your help, but I don't think I'd be able to truthfully commit to anything as long-term as full partnership. That said, I guess I can't really hold off on that last part any longer." When he finished talking Robin out of press-ganging him onto the team, Skye took a few steps back so that he had the blank huge-screen TV as his backdrop, then indicated that everyone sit down. They complied slowly, Raven giving him the oddest look since he'd stated his reluctance to be on their team. She'd expected an infiltrator/betrayer again, and him not wanting in hadn't been on her suspicion checklist.

"Now, before I go any further, I should think it fair to warn you that most of what I'm about to say is kept secret by unspeakably foul and violent means, and that the revelation of this knowledge could very well mean your deaths, mindwipings, or abductions. I have no intention of letting any of that stuff happen, but the possibility exists, however slim, that hearing this could put you in danger, so I'm not going to say anything more without your consent."

"Oh _great_, now there's no _way_ I'm gonna miss this!" shouted Cyborg, as a way of expressing the common disdain of such a theatrical statement. Skye wondered if he'd laid it on too thick and compromised their normal level of caution with his warning, but decided it was a bit late to change things. The vibe he got form the room was one of intense concentration on him, so at least he knew they weren't taking it lightly.

"So listen, I already told you I come from outer space. Big deal right? I mean, you've got one alien on your team and who knows how many living in the city, not to mention regular visits from extra-terrestrials bent on everything from world domination to immigration, so I'm sure that hardly phases you. The somewhat unique factor of my origin is the fact that I'm currently in the 'employ' of a completely unscrupulous military police organization that controls almost all of inter-dimensional and inter-temporal travel and trade. The Inter-Dimensional Police, or IDP, is a subsidiary organization of the Central Worlds, a coalition of higher-dimensional beings that use the IDP to protect their high technology and further their inscrutable ends under the guise of policing criminal activities involving time travel and dimension hopping. A rotten bunch all around, completely devoid of anything resembling a scruple to hold them back from whatever it is they want."

"I do not understand!" interrupted Starfire angrily, as she leapt to her feat, startling all the others from their absorption in Skye's tale. "Why would you choose to work for such evil people? We have rumors of the IDP on Tamaran, and no decent people associate with them!"

"Yes, I understand Starfire," Skye immediately responded, trying to assuage her anger, "and I assure you that I don't work for them willingly. The bastards are blackmailing me most viciously, and have been from the moment I 'signed on' no less than five years ago. If I had a choice—"

"There is always a choice! I demand to know what it is that they could threaten you with to gain your compliance in the unspeakable things they do! The whispers of those who travel the galaxy speak of the disappearance of scientists, shameless extortion of whole civilizations for the right to use slipspace to travel the cosmos, the deaths or imprisonment of those who use slipspace technology in their spacecraft without payment, even the stripping of whole worlds of their resources. Why do you aid in such things?"

"I don't want to talk about it. It's not exactly—"

"Do not tempt me further Mr. Skye, for I am already prepared to strike! I will never tolerate the lapdogs of the IDP!" and there was a true fire in her tone now, as though she was actually willing to vaporize Skye with the green fusion energy playing through her eyes and around her hands. She'd nearly choked on her own tongue the moment he'd said IDP, he'd felt the emotional buildup coming, could feel it burning like a small star now, and was able to sense such an acute danger that he knew her threat to be no idle posturing. It was more than enough to coax the story out of him, though he was loathe to discuss that part of his life.

"Be calm warrior, your fire need not be wasted on me," Skye said, using a perfect translation of a Tamaranean saying that managed to catch Starfire off guard, so that she actually did drop the charge in her eyes and hands. "If you must know," and now some bitterness evaded his best efforts and crept into his tone, "They have my family. My two little sisters are their hostages, frozen in stasis crystals and stacked in their ultra-secret high security holding facility. If I ever openly defy them, first they kill me, then they kill my two little sisters. They're all I have left, and their lives mean more to me than my own, so I've had little choice but to comply with whatever they want, at least out in the open." Skye's whole body seemed to darken as he related this story, maybe as a side-effect of his powers, or maybe because he radiated a rancid discontent that had nothing to do with psychic powers and everything to do with unadulterated hate. Starfire found herself lost in this hate, far outstripping her own feelings on the matter, and dropped to her knees between Skye and the couch. Robin was there the next instant, but Skye had already launched into a verbal assault.

"I don't know what kind of chip you've got on your shoulder about the IDP, but I hope you're satisfied now. You're not the first to have reacted that way, lord knows I've been working under those bastards for long enough to know there's a great reason for people to hate them, so what's yours?"

"My… my friend. She vanished when I was young… she was all I had after my parents… and my sister… she was all. When last I heard of her, she had attempted to plane-hop through a transdimensional singularity. Though all warned her that we could not afford the IDP tribute for extradimensional passage, none could keep her away from seeing slipspace, and, when she did not return, the worst was assumed. The IDP took her, and I will never see her again." The pained tears in her eyes were a common sight to Skye, who'd heard the same story a million times during his travels. As he became the focus for all kinds of unpleasant emotions from the others, none of whom liked what they heard, especially not Starfire being in tears, his emotions began to follow their familiar pattern. The rage that remembering the depth of his own predicament always brought about was already fading away as his emotions tended to, and now he replaced the feeling with one of compassion. There was more yet to explain.

"People like me, the Involuntaries, those that the IDP collects and presses into service, formed a secret collective. We have all pledged to work against the IDP as best we can, within bounds of not violating our contracts and forfeiting whatever it is that they have us by. By the Involuntary Resistance, a pipeline of refugee prisoners has been going for years now, those of us placed in the IDP general holding facility able to smuggle out a small number now and then. Those that don't deserve to be there, people picked up for those damn slipspace tax violations and the like, are tracked and placed on a list for extraction. It's actually rather funny, because the CW are fucking bastards when it comes to forcing us to capture violators, but once we've got them, they don't really give a damn what we do with them. Oh they have a reeducation program going to brainwash prisoners into workers, but they don't have any efficient way of doing it, so prisoners back up by the billions, frozen in crystal stasis, row upon innumerable row of them."

"Are you saying…?" Starfire asked with a sniff, getting her tears under control as hope bloomed in her heart.

"Once I'm back in communication with my people, I'll have your friend upped on the list. With luck, we can get her out before her reeducation date rolls up. What's her name?"

"Her name…?" Starfire was a little bit too overcome with emotion to catch on right away, but she caught up faster than anyone could have expected. "Her name was… is… Naraprin'sa. But why—"

"Hold that thought while I check the archives," he cut her off, then proceeded to cross his arms and lean his head back till he looked lazily up at the ceiling, rolling his head from side to side and humming, of all things. The tuneless ditty held a striking resemblance to elevator music, and the room took on the uncomfortable ambience of an elevator as most of the Titans tried just to catch up with what had been revealed here. Things had gotten complicated faster than imaginable.

"HA!" Skye made a sudden sound of success, then lolled his head back into normal position. "Naraprin'sa, a.k.a. 'Heartwind,' apprehended for slipspace tax violations and imprisoned in crystal stasis about five years ago. Reeducation date is fifty seven years from now, evacuation date is a hundred and ninety years from now. I can fix that and have her out about as soon as the communication clears with resistance prime—"

"Oh _thank you_ friend Skye!" Starfire shouted, sweeping forward with an embrace that Skye felt coming but could not gracefully evade, "I have misjudged you terribly," and tears once again clogged her words, "I never dared hope to she Heartwind again, and now you will… how can I possibly thank you for such a gift?

"Please… don't thank me." and Skye was coolly withdrawn, even in Starfire's eminently warm hug of gratitude, "I simply wish there had been something I could have done to keep her from ever being taken. As it is, you will have your friend back, but she will be young still, the same age she was when frozen, and it will be a small miracle if she even recognizes you after how you've grown since then. Nothing I can do will truly mitigate your loss, nor replace the years Heartwind has slept through. So please, don't thank me."

Starfire was actually kind of staggered by his distance, but fortunately, didn't take it personally. There was a depth of pain here too in Skye, and she was not so alien as to not notice such an ache and back away from it. As she floated slowly away from Skye then, a tear still hanging in her eye, she was intercepted by Robin, and they sat together back on the couch. All eyes were on Skye again, so he put aside whatever was on his mind and got back to the task at hand.

"Okay, so, that covers where I'm from anyway. Any new questions before I move on to why I'm here?"

"How about: How much control do the IDP have over you, and where do you draw the line on compliance with the less pleasant end of their agenda?" Raven put forth, and Skye could have kicked himself for offering.

"She's relentless," he muttered to the room in general, eliciting a smirk from Raven and good natured smiles from the rest, Raven's suspicions much safer ground than Starfire's unexpected outburst had been. "However Raven, you're barking up the wrong tree with this one. I pledged long ago to not be the pawn of those bastards, and I've been dong a damn good job of keeping that pledge."

"When I first started out, they gave me the usual set up: a fricken huge salary because they make you pay for _everything_, a full panimmunity and regenerative nanomachine treatment to keep me disease-free and damage resistant, and a mandatory cybernetic operation so I'd have neural interface ability for all their high-tech crap, so I suppose I can't say the bastards never gave me anything. As if that could counter the fact that they were employing me against my will, not to mention that the cybernetic brain computer they gave me had a control chip I had to pay an arm and leg to have removed!"

"Anyway, they first thought to use me as a spy, reading the minds of those that they directed me to. However, by no means that could ever be connected to a lack of effort on my part, none of the people ever knew anything of value, and my abysmal record on obtaining secrets prompted my transfer to fleet division. While maintaining an exemplary record as sensors manager of an entire battlegroup during a particularly nasty little war with invaders from one of the hell dimensions, I managed to keep the collateral damage down to a record low, that being zero civilian casualties for all ships under my direction. After the war I was transferred to Extra Activities Division, a euphemism for their assassins and black operations group. Two days later, a moderately high-ranking official in the IDP suddenly felt the need to transfer me to special agency. Special agency allows one to pursue one's own methods when executing the will of the CW, which means I haven't had to kill anyone since then, bringing my lifetime kills to a grand total of zero, just how I like it."

"On the other hand, special agency is also considered a death sentence, which is why I was assigned to it after pumping that official full of rage I'd drained from a bar fight the night before and then insulting him to his face. Fortunately for me, my powers give me more survivability than most, and I've managed to almost enjoy daily brushes with death in exchange for never having to take an order to execute someone. I currently hold the record for consecutive days of special agency service without suffering a debilitating injury—one month, four days."

After his half-brag anecdote had petered out here, Raven was looking sour again and the rest had a new respect for him. His story was a bit far-fetched, but something about the way he told it, the way Starfire confirmed it somewhat, and just the way he'd acted so far, made them more or less able to accept it. All this definitely thrust part two of Raven's big question to the forefront of everyone's mind: what the hell was this guy doing here?

"So, I can tell you all want to know what brings me here," Skye rarely disappointed expectations, which he could follow as easily as most did facial expressions, "and that's certainly the next logical thing for me to explain. About seventy hours of Earth-time ago, someone tried to kill me. Not an unusual circumstance to be sure, but after analyzing the situation, I realized the assassin had been sent from here. That tipped me off to come here, and wouldn't you know it? The second I came out of slipspace around the planet, my senses started going crazy, every iota of my being flooded with a foreboding that spoke of universal threat, something on a scale I've never even imagined could exist. Sensing around led me straight to Jump City, and the explosions lead me to that battle yesterday. That's why I was there—I helped because it seemed the right thing to do, you know?" He launched into his next line of explanation before anyone could begin to respond to that one, already sensing the next series of questions forming.

"Now, before Raven can begin to call that into question, let me explain further still. First off, no, there isn't anything particularly unusual about me jamming from one side of the galaxy to another when someone's tried to kill me. I'm vindictive like that, plus I didn't like the idea of someone who wants me dead being on my home planet. As for the sense of foreboding, my precognitive ability has never failed alert me to something liable to kill me in the near future, as evidenced by the fact that I'm still breathing after three years of a job that usually kills a guy inside of six months. The magnitude of the feeling is evidence of how many are liable to die, and as I said, it's looking to be a whole crapload of people, including myself and everyone I care about. Thus here I am."

"_Okay fine_—just shut up for a second!" snapped Raven, the first to squeeze her voice over Skye's. It was quickly becoming apparent that this guy had a penchant for intelligent lecture, despite his often dirty vocabulary, and that he tended to get carried away when he spoke. Raven's interruption had stopped him cold, and now he looked a bit sheepish for his overspoken explanation.

"Good," she once again burst out, when Skye had clearly stopped gabbing, a rare look of deep concern on her face and, shockingly, in her tone, "Now tell me, do you know the nature of this threat you sensed? I only ask because I had a vision earlier myself, and what you've said makes me fear just how accurate it may have been."

"At first, no, I had no clue what it involved. After I got a close look at that guy that nearly ended us all the other day, it occurred to me what the probable cause is. What looked to be a freakishly huge human was in fact a notorious criminal from a heavy gravity world once apprehended by the IDP, one of five fabulously dangerous beings that recent managed to break out of The Can, the IDP general holding facility. It's almost certain that their presence here on Earth, in the very city my ESP lead me to, is in no way coincidental to the danger that faces the universe. I just wish I knew more."

"Five? _Damn_… that's too close to my vision. If it was really true, then this is big, bigger than all of us. We need to call the Justice League right away, Robin?" She finished with a question to the guy that was technically the leader of their bunch, and the only one authorized to call the watchtower without an immanent emergency. He had to decide on this one.

"Just hold on Raven, we don't want to jump the gun on this," he responded, and Raven could have dropped dead from shock at his rejection. His mind was focused on an old gripe of his: the eternal conflict of jurisdiction. He'd be damned before he'd hand over a bust like this to that arrogant bunch out in space, not before they'd even given it a shot. "Skye, do you know how long we have before this future is going to be unstoppable?"

"Uh, I can't really be too sure," and he was impressed that Robin knew enough about the paradox nature of timespace to ask that question, "but my gut tells me about a month. The more momentous the event, the further off it can be predicted. Right now we're teetering on the cusp between where it is merely possible and where it is certain, and it will take no less than a month for it to tip over the edge. Once again, I just wish I knew more. With the ether in the state it is now, I'll probably go precognitive again next time I sleep, and with any luck that'll be as helpful as the one I had last night."

"Wait a second, you _haven't actually had_ a vision about this yet?" Raven questioned, distracted momentarily from her distress at Robin's obstinate pride, "So what _was_ yours about?"

"Actually, it was about you, of all people. It used the rather overdramatic contexts that precognition always seems to take on, but it basically said that if I tried to hide my identity from you and yours here, then we'd all end up dead, along with most of the population of the universe. Specifically, it predicted that you and I would end up murdering each other in a magnificent bloodbath of a duel, when all else lay dead at the end of everything. I was damn glad for that warning, I tell ya, cause I came here with every intention in the world of lying about my origins as far as I felt necessary. Like I said, people are killed for knowing about the IDP when they're not supposed to, so I don't exactly spread it around. We all dodged the laser on that one."

"Damn man, how can you be all calm about that? If what you're sayin' is true, we could all have been totally screwed because you didn't want us to get hurt for knowing stuff we didn't really need to!" Cyborg grasped the situation nicely, which was more than anyone could say for Starfire or Beast Boy, who'd been left behind somewhere back when seeing the future had come up.

"Hey, that's really what ESP is all about man: avoiding those mistakes that threaten to end us. I can't count the number of times I've known of an event-path that would lead to my certain death. It's like a normal week for me is to dream of how I'm supposed to buy it in the near future and spend a few days thinking up ways to avoid it. The only way that's different from how most people live is that I know in advance which of the choices I face could be fatal, most everyone else has to make their decisions without that little advantage."

"Alright, this is getting kind of ridiculous. You're tellin' me you've got all those powers, _and_ you can see the future so well that you've never been ambushed or caught off guard? How can anyone possibly have gotten you under their thumb? You sound like a god damn superman!" Clearly Cyborg had been impressed by what he'd heard, but had reserves, knowing as he did what things that sounded too good to be true usually turned out to be. Besides, he'd caught some of Raven's suspicions once the guy had started talking about lies and futures, everything getting just a little hard to believe.

"What can I say? They caught me young and they caught me cold. I'll be out from under them eventually, but really, not because of my powers. In the end, I'm flawed work, powerful, but with _so_ many weaknesses. Up against enough robots, I'm dead. Up against a bunch of mind-shields, I'm dead. Up against a sufficiently skilled attack-mind, I'm dead. I've faced all of those and survived only because I've known the threat was coming, and even then, it's often cost me much. It's been a lifetime of near-misses for me." Skye's tone was subdued, actually sounding kind of tired of all things, as though remembering all the times he'd shared breaths with death itself was a drain on him. The whole room was soon infected with his exhaustion, the crazy story he'd just fed them combining with recent injuries to tire everyone.

"Okay, this is getting out of hand," protested Beast Boy tiredly, as he looked out at the way the afternoon sun hit the city skyline beyond the room's huge windows. "How about we break for dinner and you guys can explain this all to me a little slower? Like, when did visions of the future come in man? One minute we were getting to know Skye, the next you're jabbering about timelines and universal destruction!"

"Yes please, might we once again cover what has been said here? I am afraid I missed most of what transpired while thinking about seeing Heartwind again," and Starfire's face took on a dreamy look as she once more began to think of her oldest friend.

"Great, I think I've got a good idea of the situation, I'll explain it while we eat," Robin assured him, then, "So what do you guys want?"

"How about some Cheesesteaks?" supplied Cyborg quickly, instantly ready for the subject to swing to food.

"NO WAY! If we can't have tofu, then we're having _pasta_!" argued Beast Boy, eyes lighting at the mention of food.

"Okay, but there's gonna be _meatballs_! Big spicy pork ones, with extra grease!" and the eternal conflict began to rear its ugly head once more.

"NO MEATBALLS!" and Beast Boy grows with the force of his passion.

"_Would you two stop that_!" snapped Raven, her dark mood still percolating in vicious retaliation against everything that was going against her right now. Robin was being priggish and arrogant, Skye had gotten into her head _twice_, and everyone was just going to _accept_ this prick and his tall tales from outer space. This was shaping up to be an unpleasant evening.

After Dinner—about two hours later

While Beast Boy expounded on the virtues of veganism, Cyborg taunted him, Robin passed around after dinner mints, and Starfire sopped up the leftover _fish_ _oil_ she'd put on her pasta with the last piece of garlic bread, Raven and Skye eyed each other warily (or at least, Raven eyed and Skye, I dunno, minded… or something). Neither had eaten much during the meal, Skye assuring that he needed a little time to adjust to organic food after space rations, Raven merely being herself. Each had expressed a desire for herbal tea _at the exact same instant_, and that was where the palpable tension between them now routed from. Now Raven was positive he had been not only reading her mind all along, but now also taunting her with the fact that she couldn't detect or prove it, an unforgivable sin by any measure. Skye was getting beyond exasperated, his every effort at friendliness thwarted by the vagrancies of chance this woman was taking as signs of his absolute untrustworthiness.

"Robin," she addressed the other even as her glare was reflected off of Skye's sunglasses, "we need to talk about this whole, 'not calling the Justice League' thing."

"You think it's a terrible idea, right?" anticipated Robin smoothly, wondering at the way the two concentrated on one another, a different expression and one would think them infatuated lovers rather than two people who couldn't seem to stand one another.

"We _are_ talking about the whole universe here, it's not the kind of responsibility I want riding on my shoulders. We should turn this over to them and be done with it before things go _bad_." Raven's tone was reasonable, reserved, but held a potential for fire just below the surface that Robin could feel, and suddenly the whole table was silently concentrating on the conversation.

"Come on Raven, Jump is _our_ city; it's our responsibility to make sure all criminal activity around here is taken care of if the police can't handle it. That was the deal we made when we took the job, when we formed the Titans. We've never had to ask for help, not even in the darkest times of Terra's betrayal, and I don't plan to start now just because some offworld crooks with a bad reputation have come to town." Robin's tone had fallen into a familiarly unshakeable determination, and Raven only hoped he didn't start doing that thing where he clenched his fists and paced dramatically in front of the new guy. DAMN! Can't start thinking of him like that! "Besides," Robin finished, "We saved the universe during that whole Larry thing, so it's not like we lack experience in the category."

"Hey, when that dimension hopping weirdo cracked reality open, we didn't get a _choice_ to call for help. We're lucky all of existence didn't end, as it probably would have if the little imp hadn't gotten his act together!" and her tone became biting and heated, even as its central neutrality stayed fixedly in place.

"I hate to burst your bubble Raven," and Skye was truly regretting the necessity of disagreeing with her while she was in this mood, "but I have to agree with Robin. If we bring in any out of town muscle, they're liable to split, something they're apparently quite good at considering they escaped from the universe's most advanced prison. Granted that would solve your problem, for a while, but these people aren't the types to give up. The place they take up their schemes next might not include people who know they're up to something, and then there goes the universe, that same one _we_ _all_ live in. This is you guys' choice, but I know where my vote would go—if I had one."

"Please, if I want your opinion, I'll ask for it. Us knowing about these guys isn't liable to do much good if they _KILL_ us! Just that _one_ of them came closer to murdering _all_ of us than anything _Slade_ ever threw at us in all the time we fought him! What makes you think we can take on _five_ guys like that?"

"The woman makes a point," Cyborg agreed readily, not relishing another brush with complete destruction, even as he felt his pride stung at the way that guy had mopped the floor with him.

"Hey, come on guys, don't let the way that ambush went get you down. I've seen all kinds of people from all over this galaxy, and let me tell you, you guys are some of the toughest. You can count the number of people who can survive a fight with Haplipop Bluhime and not get out of the fourth order of magnitude. On a galactic scale, that's almost unimaginable, so you know you're doing okay. Add the fact that you had no clue what you were going up against and still got out alive, and you get a much better idea of relative strengths."

"Skye…" Raven grimaced harshly, the first time her gaze had deviated from him since the tea gaff, "we only survived because you showed up when you did. Without you, we'd all be dead right now."

The room was pervaded with a clinging silence following her admission, everyone there shocked beyond description by what she'd just said. It was the silently held consensus that she'd have sooner eaten her own cape than admit she owed Skye anything, much less her life. Even if it apparently was in support of her side of the argument, no one could quite believe it, and it was a long moment before Skye could stammer his response. His shock was proof that not even ESP could prepare you for everything.

"Well… damn… you don't really owe me anything. Besides, it's not like you guys wouldn't do the same for me if you found me on the verge of death against a vicious raging beast of an opponent. In the same breath Raven, it's not like I'm going anywhere. As long as these guys I'm after are here, and frankly, as long as I can reasonably manage to stay away from the IDP, I'll be around to clue you in before ambushes and the like, so you won't be caught off-guard the next time. If I can just figure out who were up against, we can even get ready in advance, level the battlefield beforehand, you know? I'm no slouch in a fight either, by the way," and he smiled charmingly, his sculpted features molding surreally around his powerful jaw. Raven felt her heart skip a beat, then quashed the wretched emotion just barely in time to prevent a power explosion. A quirk around the side of his mouth the next moment told her all she needed to know: he'd noticed, and now he knew. You couldn't hide anything from those damn espers.

"Yeah, fine, I'll go along with it for now," she responded calmly to his assurances, trying to play the full-body hiccup off as something other than attraction to him, "but if I end up dead over this, I'll haunt you forever. I know many ways to make the living… wish they _weren't_" and the threat came off with deadly precision. Skye felt his whole body shudder with the thought of what she really could do to him if she wanted to. It was hard to forget that she was part demon when every time he looked at her, her aura glared back in dull malignance. He wondered silently what kind of effort it took to keep that much destructive force contained, then dropped the consideration as overly prying.

"Great, then it's settled. Skye, consider yourself a temporary Teen Titan, good for as long as you're here on Earth. Together, we'll bag those crooks, save the universe, and maybe even find a way to help you out with that whole IDP thing." Robin spoke with confidence, and while Skye felt that anything was possible, he also believed in picking the fights you could win and being cautious of everything, so he felt the need to try and reign the Boy Wonder in a bit.

"Hey Robin, lets just concentrate on the problem at hand first, okay? Like, do you guys have a place I could crash for the night? A couch will do fine, I just want to make sure it's okay and everything. I really don't want to impose more than I already have."

"No problem man, I know just the place. It's an extra room we haven't been using for anything recently, just sitting there, ready to be lived in. There shouldn't be any problem with you sleeping there for now."

"Helooo? Robin, all the extra rooms are bare right now!" corrected Beast Boy loudly, always hoping to one up Robin, who was almost never wrong. Combine that with the fact that Beast Boy was almost never right, and you see why it will be a long time before he actually gets ahead of spiky-hair in the count. Didn't stop him from trying though. "The only rooms with beds in them are our rooms, and I for one don't want to sleep in the same room as a guy that can suck out my dreams! … No offence dude."

"A common complaint, and one I don't take personally," muttered Skye coolly, earning a bit of surprise respect from Raven, who knew she would have clocked B.B. for that one.

"On the contrary Beast Boy," Robin countered the offered rebuke, tossing his spiky hair and grinning as he relished yet another victory, "there _is_ one bed that isn't being used right now." Beast Boy's eyes nearly popped out of his head when he realized what the older guy was talking about.

Terra's Room

"HE CAN'T STAY HERE!" Beast Boy shouted adamantly, for about the thirtieth time since his first protest back around the kitchen table.

"We… aren't… using… it… for… anything—" Robin struggled to get out as he dragged the dead weight of the green one behind him and into Terra's old room. The little guy was being way too touchy about this, the same way he had gotten every time they'd tried to pack up her stuff and clear the room back to the empty shell it had once been.

"HE CAN'T!" B.B. continued his protest, dragging at his leader's cape and arm in his attempt to turn them all away from the shrine of his forlorn memories. He hadn't kept the place ready for her imminent recovery just so some stranger could muss it all up.

"HE CAN!" and now Robin too was reduced to shouting, fed up with the insubordination and purely childish behavior of their resident changeling. Robin respected the guy's feelings, especially after he'd come to terms with his own for Starfire, but the guy had to admit that they were no closer to curing Terra than they'd ever been.

"HE CAN'T!"

"HE CAN!"

"HE CAN'T!"

"HE CAN!"

"I can't stay in here guys," said Skye as he stood calmly next to the shouting pair, never moving an inch while his senses took in the space.

"NO YOU CAN'T!" Beast Boy turned his emotions on the other muscular jerk in the room, "I'm not just going to just STAND BY and let some WIERDO from outer space live in Terra's—" his eyes open and he thinks for a moment as he pauses, "what did you say?"

"I can't live in here," Skye repeated, as though he hadn't just been shouted at and called names.

"Hey, I know it's a little breezy, but if you don't like the ocean view we can hang some plastic and—" Robin was cut off by Skye before Beast Boy could turn around and clobber him, rage filling the green one's soul at Robin's willingness to desecrate Terra's room for this new guy.

"That's not the problem. This place _belongs_ to somebody. Every inch of it is permeated by someone's feelings, their—her—thoughts and emotions bathe the whole space. A blond, rather skinny, but very pretty, lived the happiest days of her life in this room, and while it wasn't recent, everything in here still reeks overpoweringly of her soul. I _can't_ live in here." As Skye finished explaining his protest, everyone fell to a sad silence. Though he certainly hadn't meant to, Skye had managed to reopen wounds they'd all thought had closed over the past few months. Robin especially felt the heel as he remembered the good times with Terra he'd been blocking studiously out of his mind as he tried to pitch her property to the new guy.

"This woman," Skye continued, when he realized what an effect his words had had, "whoever she was, I can sense that there are some mixed emotions about her. You speak of her simultaneously as a betrayer and a trusted friend, and the feelings that radiate when you begin to think of her are some of the most bittersweet I've ever come across. What exactly happened with her?"

"It… It…" Robin tried to begin the sad tale, but sort of trailed off while searching for where to begin it. None of them had ever attempted to relate the story to someone who didn't know who Terra was or what she'd done, and it was harder than Robin could ever have imagined.

"It's a long story," cut in Raven smoothly, "one for another time." Whatever had inspired her earlier frankness with Skye had dissipated, and it was back to distant belligerence with a vengeance. Her tone was so cold one could almost feel the frost sweep across the room.

"Right. Well, the couch will do fine then. It isn't that late yet, but we've all had a craptacular pair of days, so I elect that we all get some rest and make an early start at tracking down that lot of crooks tomorrow. Who knows what might become possible, with a new day and all?" As he asked the obviously rhetorical question, everyone began to realize just how tired they were. Some of them had only just pulled away from life threatening injuries a few hours ago, after all, and none of them had escaped from the battle with Blue unscathed. Only Raven, her cold purple eyes focused on Skye, didn't seem ready to clock out for the night, and Skye was not at all oblivious to the malignance painted all over her face.

Roof of the Tower—That Night

(Raven)

"I can't believe how this is going," muttered Raven to herself, as she stared listlessly out at the nighttime ocean. The bright moonlight reflected coldly on the late summer waves, the endless rolling motion of Jump Bay creating a million reflections of the pale glow to dazzle the eyes and calm the soul. For all the good it was doing Raven, it might as well have been a landscape painted by a retarded kindergartner.

She'd been trying for the past two hours to meditate, to find the calm center of herself that would shield her from this strife and extinguish the turmoil that bubbled away within her, threatening to explode at any moment. Every time she'd almost achieved peace, that face would creep in again, that damn pale face with its empty white eyes and unreal perfection, haunting her mind and shattering her concentration. As if that wasn't enough, the mere _thought_ of his smile created a fluttering in her chest and a heat in her lower stomach that she didn't appreciate at all, and it was truly beginning to mess with her head. _No one_ should have this affect on her.

On top of all of that, there was the way the guy acted, energetically confident, as though everything in the world was worthy of his attention, but also like he couldn't be surprised by anything and so couldn't really appreciate the world around him. He'd walked in with that smooth attitude of his, claimed her friends' hearts, and was now preparing to drag them all off on a mission liable to end in the deaths of everyone she cared about. Threaded through the terror she felt at the similarity this was taking on to the mess with Terra, not to mention the need she felt that reminded her almost nauseatingly of Malchior, was the grating memory of the vision her father had visited upon her, telling her exactly what would become of her friends should she _reject_ this guy's help.

"I don't understand how this could be happening," she complained bitterly to the world in general, trying to shake the reality of it all from her head. She normally wasn't the type to resort to denial, having little but contempt for those that sought to escape their reality's pitfalls that way, but things had gotten so completely out of hand here, she couldn't stand it.

"Nice night out here, huh?" asked an already familiar voice from about four inches behind her, startling her so badly she almost fell off the side of the tower. When she'd regained her balance, she twirled to meat the intruder with all the fire she could muster, only to find herself eye to throat with him. She'd forgotten how tall he was.

"Back off," she muttered, and black energy gripped his legs and yanked him back about three feet, giving her enough clearance to feel comfortable again. She didn't know why he was here, or how the hell he'd managed to sneak up on her like that, but she wasn't about to let him screw with her. "What exactly do you think you're doing, coming up here like this?"

"I apologize for startling you," he began, nonplused by the way she'd manhandled him away from her, "but I feel there are things we need to discuss that don't require the prying ears of your friends. I can sense that they are all quite asleep now, so I followed the emotional distress leaking from your mind shield until I found you up here."

Raven gasped and checked her shields, stepping back from him again as she realized that she _had_ been leaking and ready to kick herself for her carelessness. This guy knew exactly how distressed she was, giving him pretty well all the cards. If he was ever going to make a move against her, this would be it, she'd made sure she was in no position to counter him quite perfectly at this point.

"Please, don't be so distressed, I've come only to talk. You and I have gotten off to a terrible start here, but I need—no, I really _want_ to know you better, for some kind of trust to exist between us." His voice was sincere, but she knew about how difficult it was to fake that. Malchior had made sure she knew it.

"We already have a trust between us, or have you forgotten that secret we now share," she said bitterly as she turned from him and pulled up her hood. Her tone told him he could have handled that whole situation better, her newly hardened shield making her otherwise blank to his senses. He was just glad she didn't know how to shield against clairvoyance, lest she vanish from his sight.

"I'm sorry for showing up and screwing with your life, okay? That _is_ basically what you're complaining about right? I didn't ask to come here, I followed my guts here because I knew I would die if I didn't! I don't want to steal your friends and I don't want anything from you other than your cooperation to keep us all alive. You don't have to trust me, you don't even have to _like_ me, but could you please put all this suspicious bullshit away already? The last thing I need while trying to stave off the deaths that even now creep up on us is you frying me the next time I drain somebody!"

"Why _should_ _I_ trust you?" Raven continued to mutter her words bitterly, unwilling to even look in Skye's direction. "Since you've gotten here you've done nothing but try to ingratiate yourself with my friends, meanwhile we don't _really_ know _anything_ about you. I've been through enough to know when I can trust people, and you _haven't_ qualified."

Skye was silent after her utter rejection, and Raven felt she'd finally put him in his place. The satisfaction she'd thought the accomplishment would bring was sadly absent, and she began cursing listlessly behind shields so tight she almost didn't sense what happened next. At first she thought a breeze had kicked up, the cool sensation along her body bringing memories of many a chill ocean wind she'd enjoyed from the Tower's rooftop. When she realized her cloak was silent, that not the slightest stirring of air was present to cause the freshening gusts she felt, an involuntary gasp escaped her lips as she twisted around to look back at the man that she had thought defeated.

Rather than the well built pale man in black, Raven was greeted with a harrowing composite sight, a glowing white light with silver overlay clouding her view to the man within, the shining energy of his spirit actually overlaying his real form. He had dropped his shields.

The power that had been penned by shields better than any she'd seen since her own teachers', power that she had simultaneously feared and admired in the deepest most secret parts of her mind, was now projecting freely, creating a psychic wind that she'd felt as a physical force, so bright that her ESP's view of it had overlain her own actual vision. After a moment of stunned awe, her heart and mind skipped directly to the betrayal, the one she'd _know_ was coming, and her own power flared in response to his.

Releasing every hold she'd ever placed upon her power, she too began to glow, a white-edged black aurora growing form her hands, eyes, and mouth until it enveloped her body. As the power began to dance along her skin, she bolted down her shields as tight as she'd ever managed, knowing that the greatest threat this guy held would come straight at her mind. The two of them stood in relief for a moment, a gusting white and black ethereal wind pressing out from each to meet in a crush halfway between them.

"I knew it would come to this," Raven whispered as she prepared to strike, her hand pulling back with a sphere of destructive force she fully intended to push through his chest until he passed out, or worse. Before she could strike however, she was struck by something herself, and it was so unexpected that it forced her to pause where she floated. Amusement. A sense of amusement so utterly palpable that she felt it infect her own mind quite distractingly, shattering her concentration faster than anything else she could have imagined. He found something funny about this! The feeling faded, and she pulled even stronger shields as he approached a bit closer.

"I'm sorry for projecting like that," he apologized, as though he could read her reaction straight through her shields, "but I can't help but wonder what your doing? I drop my shields and the next thing I know you're ready to gut me!"

"I think I know an attack when I see one," she snapped back at him in a low, dangerous tone, reforming her attack, only to have a new wave of humor bowl her over like she wasn't shielding at all. What the hell was going on?

"Raven, the only thing I'm going to 'attack' is the questionable credibility of your suspicions. Now please, though it is an incomparably beautiful sight, I would ask that you lighten up the power display; I don't feel like getting gutted tonight."

Raven slowly complied, _feeling_ the truth in his words. That must have been it, she suddenly realized, and allowed herself to fall to the ground while dropping much of the power she'd summoned to her body. The last vestiges clung and roiled over her skin as was always its want, and she let it for once, deciding that if Skye was going to let himself hang out like he was, she wouldn't bother packing hers away either. It actually felt a little nice to let go. That moment was when she realized that something was different, the change she felt in herself was incredible, and now that she thought about it, she had to attribute it to him.

"How are you doing that?" she asked simply, too calm now to phrase the question the way she'd planned to, with venomous fire and suspicion.

"You're an empath, I'm projecting my calm and you're picking it up," he said simply, and now that she was paying full attention, she could sense the utter lack of threat from him as well as the truth in his words.

"That shouldn't be possible," she protested calmly, expressing her confusion with a slight crinkling of her brow, "my shields—"

"Are very good, but not perfect. My telepathy lets me feel quite loudly—at least with things I'm good at like calm and coolness—and you're a better empath than you give yourself credit for. Combined with a very mild vampiric influence, we get to have your mind free of fear and anger, without even violating your taboo against the draining."

"When I can feel angry again, I _will_ get you back for this," she said, although it lacked the ring of truth that his voice reinforced with every word. He caught this fact too.

"If you really meant that, you could make me pay right now. That incantation of yours could send your power flying even without a strong emotional impetuous, right?"

"Okay," amd Raven would have been shaken if she could feel anything at all, "before I begin to freak out on this normalcy high you forced on me, I want to know where you learned so much about me. Were you…?"

"_For the last time_, I haven't read your mind, not even a little bit. I'm guilty of hearing what you've let slip, I won't deny that, but what do you want me to do, walk around blind with all my senses shut off? Anyway, I'm mostly just guessing, ESP does the rest." His tone expressed none of the irreverence his words implied, still an unimpeachable truth pervading all he said. She was somewhat tempted to read his mind right now while his shields were down, and that she could still consider such underhanded tactics told her this guy had truly refrained from doing more than calming her. That was a _small_ point in his favor.

"You're a good guesser," Raven said, managing to urge a small whisp of her own annoyance out from under the calm that so permeated the air that her powers couldn't help but suck it up, even through her best shields. "So tell me, why exactly am I so wrong about you? Here you seem to have proven me right, ambushing me with calm against my will."

"I thought you _liked_ being calm?" An ice that had nothing to do with Skye's enforced calm doused Raven as he zinged her a good one. She traced his knowledge of this instantly to her outburst in Robin's med-bay room, and she damned her overbearing emotions once again. He'd known her weakness all along.

"I'm sorry, that wasn't fair. I was merely edging my way into my big gambit. I'm going to explain to you exactly why you don't trust me now, while you can't help but listen rationally, and then I'm going to hope my hunch bears through and you don't skin me for it."

"I'm _all ears_," Raven said, managing to press sarcasm into the words, but she felt a tremor in her chest that she couldn't place a reason for, straight through the blanket of calm. She had been hassling him because he was an unsavory, presumptuous, and extremely dangerous man who reminded her glaringly of all the other times she'd been betrayed. …Right? The tremor became a pulse of fear: she couldn't _honestly_ say why she'd been so hard on him, not with her mind clear like this.

"I walked into your life and, really, made a _crappy_ first impression," he began, and Raven's fear began to coagulate as his conversational tone belied the gravity of his words. "But at the same time, something extra happened, something that set you on edge further than any misunderstanding or natural caution could ever account for. Every subsequent time this extraneous influence came into play, you became moody and suspicious all over again, even when there was nothing actually substantial you could blame it on. I've been catching the brunt of your discontent constantly since it cropped up. Would you care to hear my theory on what exactly this extra influence was?"

Raven broke out in a cold sweat, her heart leaping into her throat as Skye's artificial calm melted fully from her mind. She knew what was coming, but even still she tried to deny it. The inevitability of it was like a wave cresting over her, her body heating in embarrassment as she waited for the axe to fall.

"Raven," he said calmly, "we have feelings for one another."

As she registered exactly what he'd just said, her heart actually stopped for a moment, the world around her standing still with it. The thought, "he likes me too?" had just enough time to blast through her brain before a pulse of heat yanked her back into real time and wrenched a wave of energy from her body before she even had a chance to repress it. A few feet behind her, a ventilation duct exploded spectacularly in a burst of black, then landed to clatter loudly to a stop. After a long moment of stunned shock, she remembered to be indignant.

"D…don't flatter yourself," she stammered, but it rang empty once more. She was getting irritated by the way his truthfulness quashed out her own ability to lie. Ignoring her jibe, he fell backward onto his butt, sitting down hard on the roof's gritty floor.

"I didn't think anything of my own feelings at first. I figured, 'wow, here I am on Earth for the first time, and what do I find but a spectacularly attractive human girl right away.' I'd never felt such an irresistible physical reaction before, not to any of the humanoid alien women I've run across, so I figured it was a species thing at first. Then our powers started reacting, and I got discouraged. _Then_ I got a feel for your _personality_, and I lost hope. Then… then I got a whiff of _your_ feelings for _me_, and I got suspicious. I thought, 'why would a woman like that feel anything for me? She's been riding my back like white on rice, more likely to punch me in the teeth than go out with me—"

"_Damn_ _right_," she interrupted.

"—so what could be the source of that?'"

"Then it hit me—" and he smacked himself upside the head for emphasis, "—_our powers interact_. Would you care to expel some small amount of your energy into the air, for the sake of experiment?" His request was a simple one, and what he'd been saying had Raven more than a little shell-shocked. The guy hadn't teased her, hadn't pressed her about the feelings, hadn't even really made any kind of a deal out of it, not so much as though it wasn't a big thing as though the whole situation was sad rather than embarrassing or exciting. It was massively outside what she'd expected from a guy his age, and his maturity was an exceptionally surprising change from what she was used to.

With little better to do, she complied, giving an underhanded toss that floated a sphere of black power into the air. At the same time then, he released a fizzing white blob from the great glowing mass of his aura, sending it in an arc that would take it nowhere near her own projectile. As they floated into the air, a sudden force gripped the two and they rocketed together and annihilated one another in a flash of gray faster than the eye could follow. As the afterimage faded from her eyes, Raven followed Skye's example and collapsed onto the ground, falling away from the explosion in complete amazement. It was as she was absorbing what she'd seen that Skye began to speak again.

"When we shocked each other in the med-bay, I figured it was some weird parallel between spiritual energies and static electricity buildup. Stranger things _have_ happened. Then when we realized that our powers amplified when combined, I got to thinking it was some odd effect of polar attraction, some kind of constructive waveform interference. Now I know, it's a fatal attraction, a pull of violent mutual annihilation, the combination of opposites to form a short-lived superform. Not only that, but it would seem that you and I have had our hormones hijacked by our spirits. The attraction between our energies sought an outlet, some pull to yank us into contact so the reaction could take place, and perchance both of us had left a certain weakness in our defenses, something we'd never considered as a potential threat."

"Physical attraction," Raven completed the thought as she continued to come to terms with the indisputable nature of his words. The elegant way this revelation fit with everything she'd been feeling was almost insane, and she was overcome by pure shame as she considered the depth of the weakness she'd shown.

"I've haven't seen a human woman since I was twelve years old, and those I knew then were my mother and my sisters. I've never felt any attraction to aliens, so I've never had to guard against seduction or anything like that."

"I've… disregarded that part of myself," admitted Raven, seeing no point in guarding secrets at this point. "There is no room in my life for any kind of relationship, nor any way for me to safely enjoy the feelings involved. My nearly uncontrollable powers make sure of that. I was always _so sure_ that I could keep down any feelings I'd ever have for a man, that I could suppress and divert them like I have all my others, all my life, that when this whole thing with you started, I must have panicked. I thought I was loosing control of myself, that I was loosing the self-possession that allows me to live my life, so I struck out at you to keep the feelings down. It was idiocy and weakness on my part, something I'd never forgive in others, and… I'm sorry. As far as I'm concerned," she stops to sigh deeply, "You've earned the benefit of the doubt. Truthfully, I can sense no deceit in what you've told us so far, not even with your shields down. That I never could merely made it harder to deny why I was actually pissed at you."

Skye accepted her apology in silence, projecting an air of quiet exhaustion, as though he derived no satisfaction from exposing so much of her secret inner self to the world. The silence stretched out, not uncomfortably, but quite implacably, and Raven studiously avoided looking at him as he motionlessly took in his surroundings. The night was warm, but a cool breeze, a true wind rather than a spectral one now, kept the night comfortable, so neither felt any particular impetuous to move. Skye still wasn't shielding, but Raven had gotten so used to the overlap between her ESP vision of his aura and her true vision of his body that she didn't even notice the white glare anymore. In truth, she'd let her own shields slip further than she'd ever before allowed, and now vague feelings and the murmuring of surface thoughts flowed freely between them, an invisible connection that bridged the gap of silence and physical distance.

"So where do we go from here?" she asked, not so much to dispel the silence as to elicit more conversation from this, she would now willingly admit, extremely interesting man. Now that she had begun to get past her insipid redirection of her own insecurity, now that she knew the weird feelings she'd been having were not a product of her loosing control, she realized that he was likely the best conversationalist she was going to meet anytime soon. Honestly, how many people had she been able to talk to about transdimensional physics and the intricacies of spiritual ambience in the past few years? And heck, he might even know something about magic.

Beyond that, he was a sensitive like her, and speech between such people, while not at all an intimacy, was far better than the casual chatting one could indulge with normals. The breadth of feeling and other kinds of information that could be communicated beyond the bounds of mere words made it very much more enjoyable. Perhaps, if she could ever feel comfortable around him considering the involuntary hormonal reaction her powers were even now trying to foist upon her, they could even try casual telepathy—a true delight of meeting minds.

"_Whoa now, baby steps Raven,_" she cautioned herself, and managed to do so discreetly enough not to project it. Even her telepathic ability was improving now that that disgusting stress was lightening from her soul. On the other hand, with it gone, she was almost frightened by how nice it was just to be around him, relaxing in a way she'd not recently enjoyed. Living in a world of normals had made her forget what being around other senstitives was like.

"I really don't know," Skye admitted, not usually what one heard from an esper and a precognitive. "The simple fact is that the relationship our powers so desire would be hysterical for its impossibility."

"Well gosh," she interrupted on the fly, "You don't have to sound all broken up about it," It was a jibe at how incredibly calm he was about this, and definitely _not_ a secret disappointment that the thought of never being able to advance a relationship with her didn't even effect him enough to alter his tone. A thrill of delight played along her spine as she felt a shadow of annoyance whisper out of him—she _was_ getting her edge back. The annoyance bubbled into a cool amusement as he got the joke and continued to lay down his point.

"Beyond the simple fact that _we can't touch one another_, neither of us are in any state to have such a liaison. I can't stay on this planet too long or the IDP will cancel my contract and execute my sisters. If I ever save them, I'll be a fugitive, so I won't be settling down after that. Besides _even_ _that_, you're not the only one with emotional issues related to your powers. _Neither_ of us would be able to really enjoy the feelings such a relationship would hopefully entail."

"What do you mean?" she asked, before she could stop herself. She'd gotten so used to the free flow of information, feeling, and simple thoughts that she'd forgotten to pretend indifference to whatever ailed him. Prying was something that never interested her, but she'd slipped up, and now a feeling of combined embarrassment and amusement flowed out of him and into her. Then, the projected feeling faded, and she realized what he must be talking about.

"I know you've noticed, an empath like you couldn't have missed it. I feel, then the feelings fade away, vanishing from existence rather than commuting to memory. You once asked me if the nature of my power was degenerate or concessive. The answer is, neither—my power is infinitely cyclic. The core of vampiric energy in my soul, that energy form that allows me to consume the various extra-corporeal energies of other beings, demands constant feeding, just like any other hunger, or it begins to complain, so it obviously isn't concessive. When I have naught to feed it, or when I've been lax on satisfying it, it turns cannibalistically on my own emotions as its food source. The draining affects only strong emotions when it's been well fed, but generally only the most insipid shadows of sensation avoid its appetite. In the end, if it truly hungers, it can transform me into an emotionless husk."

He let her chew on that for a second as he stretched his back out from where he sat. Raven knew what he said was true, and maintained a quiet attention as he continued with what was obviously hard for him to talk about.

"I can't die of starvation like that, so it isn't quite degenerate either, but I can become cold, a creature of iced soul without emotion to stay the striking hand or quicken the heart with concern. As a matter of fact, I spend an ungodly amount of my life stuck near a state like that, much of today for example. I'm afraid most of the loud confidence and cheerful banter I squeezed out earlier was kind of an act I put on so people don't suspect, so they don't worry themselves over my condition. I can feel very loudly, as you no doubt noticed, but calm is the only thing I have in enough abundance to give to others—I simply _can't_ maintain a feeling, at least not beyond the truly subdued, so if I actually stuck to how I felt in interactions … it'd be pretty scattered. I've talked from my gut before, and it disturbs the hell out of people, so I've gotten good at acting like a plain person, just to not bother others so much. On the other hand, I don't bother putting on an act when I'm after marks for the IDP, and my mannerisms, the ones that truly reflect how I _feel_, have earned me monikers ranging from 'Ice King' to 'Winter Skye,' because of course, _I feel nothing_. That lack has lead to… to me sometimes… _hurting_ others… more than I could ever wish to…" She thought he was done for a moment, and she was struck by just how similar this was to what she herself had faced in life (had she not had free access to his mind, she'd have been _justifiably_ suspicious about this) but he struck up a final note, almost having to wrench it out of himself, so much effort did it take to describe.

"Otherwise… I have the damnedest trouble _remembering_ what things feel like. I never forget anything, not a single fact or figure that enters my mind, but as for feelings I've had, sometimes I forget even the love I hold for my own two sisters, however briefly, and then, if the hunger has been fed, I get a reminder of what bitter sadness feels like."

"That sounds… I mean… I wasn't trying to pry," Raven said, as she examined the way the stinging regret he'd been projecting almost listlessly into the air faded away, just as every other strong emotion she'd felt from him had. He'd been angry, he'd been happy, he'd been repentant and nervous, but none of these feelings had lasted nearly as long as they should have, and some, she realized as she thought back, hadn't registered as feelings at all—he'd been faking them. She'd been so wrapped up in her own semi-neurotic terror of loosing control that she'd barely noticed. If she'd known it had been a cover act, maybe his big talk and seeming disdain for his surroundings wouldn't have been so annoying, but then again, considering how little rational thought had been involved in her suspicions, maybe it would have just bothered her more.

"Don't worry about it… you can't pry into that which is freely revealed. I… I know you didn't really want to share my darkest secret… and I apologize for forcing it on you without asking… but thanks for listening. This is actually the first time I've told anyone the whole story about that." His voice contained the semi-neutral warmth that seemed to pass for happiness for him most of the time, much, she realized, as it did for her. The subdued smile he sent her way hit her somewhere in the stomach, causing that warm-gooey reaction again, and she almost blushed this time—almost.

"Damn but we're a pair huh?" he continued, the warmth heating slightly more, apparently being a gentle enough emotion that it didn't tempt the Draining's hunger. "Here you are, a woman who will self-destruct if she feels any strong emotions and who thus is required to dedicate most of her free time to containment of the horrendously dangerous power of a naturally volatile portion of the psyche. Meanwhile, I'm a guy who can't feel strongly long enough to really appreciate it, who lives from fading emotion to fading emotion in pursuit of a phantom of happiness that I might grip for some few moments before it too is consumed by my own vicious powers, seeking to scrape together enough emotion to keep me from being an empty war machine. Each of us suffers badly from what the other pursues so as to avoid harming others, one tortured by how her emotions force her to loose control, the other by the way his lack of such forces him to much the same end. Fire and ice, rage and emptiness, the cold light and the hot darkness, twisting and twining in a dance of all consuming apposition. We're locked up in an involuntary attraction that, if consummated, would result in an explosion of energy so huge it would probably tear a hole in the fabric of reality."

"Put it like that, it does sound rather pathetic," and Raven was almost delighted to have assumed a pleasantly cynical neutral tone, the first she'd really managed since she'd caught sight of Skye in Starfire's recovery room. On the other hand, his words struck a deep chord within her, the true sadness of their mysteriously linked souls cutting to places she normally reserved for the loss of friends and the destruction of dreams. She shouldered the weight of this new dilemma in her life even as Skye responded to her comment.

"Tell me about iTIHHDH—" Skye sputtered and convulsed suddenly where he sat, a wave of icy power jolting off his aura like blizzard wind and nearly flattening Raven the rest of the way onto the ground. Her tenuous connection to his spirit was flooded by an infusion of fear and pain so acute that nausea gripped her stomach and cramped her guts with the need to expel what little she'd eaten. Just when she thought she was going to loose her lunch as a prelude to loosing her mind, the sensation cut off with a sudden completeness, as though a door had been slammed shut against a frozen gusting. He'd put his shields back up.

"_What's the matter_?" she managed to snap out after a moment of desperately gasping for breath, then had to wait as he himself boxed and dispelled the terror and pain that had so suddenly struck out from his center soul.

"Lots of people…" he mumbled tiredly, gasping for breath before continuing, "are about to die…"

Preview: Good? Great? Boring? Tell me about it, please! Anyway, sorry for the OC centric chapter again, that's really the last one. Now that I've gotten Skye's motives and the core of his history out of the way, we can focus on the conflict at hand. A war has broken out between Green and Slade, and if you think either gives a damn how many innocent people die in their pursuit of one another, you haven't gotten a very good sense of this story's mood yet. The Titans are on the defensive as they try to protect people from becoming collateral damage in—Gang Wars 2: The Long Night.


	16. GW2: The Long Night Begins

Intro: Here we have the beginning of a long action series in the story. This one is psychic-centric, so bear with me, my nerd instincts went on full tilt and wound out some serious sci-fi. Psi-detractors don't despair, Slade, the Titans, and the Colors will get into the serious nitty-gritty next chapter, and there's some nice mind-breaking and soul-eating to tide you all over until then. (Note: Thaumaturgy-- the science of magic. If you want to invent your own spell, if you want to understand how all that hocus-pocus works out, this is what you need to study. The prefix Thaum- refers to magic in all its shapes and forms.) 

Gang Wars II: The Long Night Begins

"_What did you say_?" Raven snapped in disbelief, dragging herself to her feat.

"Deaths… lots of them… soon," Skye mumbled between gasps of pain as he gripped his chest and struggled for air. He seemed to be in a strange kind of agony, the blank wall of his shields keeping Raven out, but the taste she'd gotten a moment ago leaving her with little doubt that he deserved a moment to recover. He was shaking slightly, but quickly regained control, Raven taking the opportunity to question him about the outburst.

"_What_ is going _on_?" then as an afterthought, when he keeled over yet again, "are you going to be okay?"

"Psychic shock… no time… come on!" Skye pulled himself together at last, regaining his footing and gesturing for Raven to come closer. Lacking any earthly clue what was happening, Raven frowned magnificently and shot Skye a dirty glare.

"Listen, in a matter of minutes, more people than I'd care to guess at are going to die, something like five miles in that direction," and he waved off toward the heart of the city, where the endless lights of the night lit the sky. There was an urgency in his voice, but now that he had gotten past the shock, it was calm and businesslike, his haste under strict control as he responded to the emergency.

Raven almost asked if he was sure, but bit back the redundant comment. Benefit of the doubt now, that was what she'd promised. Instead she leapt into action.

"We need to go get the others—" she began, and reached for her communicator. The Titan alert would wake them all and they could hop in the T-Car, be down there in… _not_ minutes.

"Raven, I don't know if we have _time_—" Skye mimicked her own thoughts, so she cut him off at the same moment she preempted the indecision creeping into her mind.

"I know—we've got to go _now_. I can get us there fast, but you have to show me the way. So show me." Raven was letting go, giving it a shot, taking a chance, even though she'd promised herself she wasn't going to open herself up like this again. She was beginning to think she was just a glutton for punishment.

"If you're sure, then fine, we'll call your friends when there's time. But how are we going to get there?" It seemed that despite everything else he'd learned, he didn't know about this power yet. Raven felt herself grow a grin almost against her will.

"I'll take care of that, you just show me where we need to be," she said, grabbing him by the cuff of his long-sleeved button-down and pulling him a long stride closer. He had grace enough not to look too pleased by his sudden proximity, and she soon felt a mental contact around her shields. The moment she let him in, her awareness expanded exponentially.

"Oh wow," she breathed, as the darkness around her drained away, leaving everything with a sharp clarity. Before she could begin to explore how much more of the world she could see, her mind was filled with an urgent presence, a sensation that called her attention like nothing she'd ever experienced. When she turned to try and satisfy the nagging, the city came into view, and a gasp escaped her lips as the blood-red aura that enveloped the business district registered.

"_That's our destination_," Skye spoke into her mind, "_The red is an image of where my danger sense has tipped me off to violence. My senses wouldn't transfer well to your perceptions, so what you're seeing, the enhanced vision and all, is after they've been through a filter. Now… how are we going to get there?_"

"_Just hold on_," Raven shot back at him, before she activated her powers and sucked them both into an inky black shadow. She felt a satisfying thrill of surprise from Skye as she secreted them into a shadowy pocket dimension, then blasted them both into the air as the shadow became a great raven and began to jet across the sky.

"_Incredible_," Skye transmitted to her mind, even from the silent blackness she'd enveloped them in for travel. His wonder was a delight, before it faded, and Raven decided that some risks did pay off, now and then. "_A thaumokinetic dimensional waveform transformation_," he continued to analyze what she'd done, "_using a technique I've never even heard of before! I really didn't know you could use a tetrathaumic energy configuration like that._"

"_You know about magic?_" Raven responded to his highly technical but completely accurate conclusion, unable to keep the deep interest out of her mental tone.

"_Don't get me wrong, I'm an esper through and through—I mean, I've got the magical aptitude of the average hunk of scrap lead. That doesn't mean I haven't taken an interest in theoretical thaumaturgy. I… hung out with a young Thurellian archmage during this one undercover operation… and his enthusiasm for it kind of rubbed off on me, even though I can't use it for anything. But anyway, damn! I've never seen casting patters used to manipulate spirit energy like that, especially not in extraplanar conversion. Who taught you that?_"

"_I taught myself_," she found herself bragging, barely able to remember the last time someone had had both the interest and the knowledge to appreciate her personalized technique. Though neither had forgotten the task at hand, and Raven's concentration on keeping them hurtling toward Skye's mark never faltered, they still found themselves majorly geeking out to an unexpected common interest. A delight of quasi-meaningless jargon was all that could have followed. "_I studied basic extraplanar conversion along the Mrriplax-Gostrogn theoretical lines, then devised this technique on my own. By utilizing a slightly offplanar wave phase I can go non-corporeal, the core of MG theory, but my dimensional fold allows me to carry more weight than the Seratin paradox limitation could ever account for, and planar-kineteic induction with the tetrathaumic energy configuration gives me speed_."

"_All the advantages of teleportation without the range limitations. Brilliant_." He complimented, and Raven would have definitely blushed this time if she hadn't been enveloped in the pitch black of her pocket dimension.

"_I tend to prefer teleportation when the distance isn't too great though—much less of a strain_." Another subtle brag from Raven, who at least now had regained a detached monotone in her mental voice.

"_Great, is there any form of thaumokinetic transportation you _can't_ use_?" and now he sounded jealous, of all things. That an esper and power-mind like him was jealous of _her_ abilities tickled her vanity, and the extra emotion actually messed with her waveform somewhat, the shadow raven that encompassed them beginning to do ecstatic spirals through the air.

"_I guess I'm just talented like that_—" but her rather graceless dismissal of his envy was cut off.

"_DOWN_!" he shouted into her mind, and to her credit, Raven didn't miss the cue.

In an instant the shadow raven touched down on an office building, sank into a puddle of shadow, and expelled the two heroes onto the rooftop. To their right was a WaneCorp building several stories taller than their own, and all other sides held nondescript office space bearing a variety of signs and billboards. The blackness of the night was held back by countless lights, so that innumerable faint shadows stretched and overlapped over every surface, the stars blocked out by the illuminated city. No sooner had he regained a complete physical presence in reality than Skye pressed his hands to his head and began mumbling to himself.

"So close… but where? Something—some _one_, will cause it, soon soon… moments… _seconds_…. _where?"_ Suddenly his head jerked up and he turned to the taller building next to them.

"_Raven—there—GO_!" snapped into her mind, carrying a force that didn't bear argument. Tailing on the end of the thought's flash speed through her mind was a quick visual of the rooftop of the WaneCorp building, an aura view of two people staring off the ledge. Before her next heartbeat, Raven had jumped through space, a swirl of black sweeping her instantly up to the next building. As she stepped forth from the exiting swirl of her power, she floated into the air, hands glowing and ready for blood.

Without wasting a moment, she jetted up and over the neon WaneCorp sign and came down just to the right of a small group exactly where Skye had shown her they'd be. There were more than two, and the hesitation she suffered as she noticed this gave her enough time to recognize a sinister silhouette.

The moment the broad shoulders, the blunt masked head, and the chiseled muscular outline registered, a flare of hate she hadn't thought herself vulnerable to anymore threatened to overwhelm her. With this particular foe, she didn't even try to suppress the rage. Riding the emotion, she muttered her mantra, summoning enough power to crack the building open, leveling it at this completely unexpected specter of the past, determined, no matter if this be truly him or some strange apparition, to send him back to hell where he belonged.

Advancing with a stealth that belied the homicidal fury this particular man had instantly elicited from her, she stopped a few yards away and behind them to consider the best way to take them all down at once. It was this momentary consideration that brought the figure at his side to her rage-clouded attention, and the comparatively diminutive form was instantly familiar, stopping her dead in the air. The red bled from her eyes as her rage was replaced by shock all the way down to the core of her being. This one _had_ to be a ghost.

Her final hesitation proved to be the fateful one, as the small form raised its hands to point at a building across and below from them, diagonal from where Skye still stood. Raven was beyond stunned, shocked so deeply by the sight of someone who was supposed to be enshrined in a volcano, who was supposed to be dead as the stone, and, she was forced to bitterly admit, who she was never supposed to have to deal with again, that she didn't even notice the ground begin to shake. It was not until the explosion that she was shocked back to awareness. Bearing witness to a thousand deaths has a tendency to do that.

The ground bucked so violently that Raven could feel it while airborne, a sound louder than any thunderclap blasting through the sky as a pinnacle of stone impaled the heart of that building, rending it apart like a melon on a spike. With the backdrop of the building crumbling across from them, a stone and glass cascade around a rock core, Raven felt her heart drop out of her chest. As nearby lights around the city died, something inside herself fell to nothingness as well, and like rushing water, a fury without boundaries filled the empty spot, and she opened four red eyes to glare at the world with hate as her only guide.

"I WILL MAKE YOU TWO PAY FOR THAT!" she bellowed, in a voice more demon than human. Slade flashed around from his lurid glare at the death Terra had just caused to stare in momentary surprise at the vessel of demonic fury that had so unexpectedly appeared behind him. Unlike Raven, his shock motivated action rather than hesitation, and he motioned for his Slade-bots to attack the very instant he recognized the threat.

With her rage in full gear, Raven's body distorted and twisted, her cloak enveloping her form and growing down to the rooftop, shadows of her spirit seeping into the ground. As the robots simultaneously leveled their weapons at her, they were grabbed from below and sucked into the floor. The humanoid forms struggled pathetically against the inhuman strength of the inky black that dragged them down, but metal acquiesced just as easily as flesh to the force of Raven's rage, and they were torn limb from limb as the blackness consumed them. Slade looked on in disappointment at the performance of his weapons, then looked up at the seething vortex of spiritual power that was Raven, not the slightest hint of fear in his stance.

"Terra, get us out of here. We have more important problems to deal with," he said, and there was the slightest sense of amusement in his tone, as though the surprise appearance of the raging sorceress was somehow funny. Terra complied instantly, the stone slab they stood on taking off smoothly and jetting away, only to be caught by tendrils of power from Raven's distorted body.

"HOW COULD YOU? HOW COULD YOU TRICK US LIKE THAT _AGAIN_? I WILL _MAKE SURE_ YOU CAN'T HURT ANYONE THIS TIME!" Raven's demon voice was deep and powerful, possessing an edge of pure hate that could only route from bloodlust, the consuming desire to see one's enemy dead forming the hot core of her words.

As she sent out enough power down the tendrils to obliterate the rock and rend its occupants into a billion tiny bits of blood and gore, Slade pulled something from his belt and leveled it at her. There was a slight tingling sensation, then a flash of all-consuming agony, then instant oblivion.

(Skye) rewind one minute

As Skye watched Raven vanish from reality, he felt her presence reappear atop the building next to his at the same moment. Able to _feel_ the imminence of death, practically _taste_ the proximity of his precognitive prediction, he tore his attention from her and turned it to the streets below. The threat was manifesting everywhere, like an explosion, so he wasted no time in preparing for the worst.

Expanding his telepathic presence to the ground, he touched the minds of the hundreds of people directly below him, be they within the offices, strolling along the streets, or driving through the night. His mind was bathed with relief at how few there were, even as he was pierced with the realization that he couldn't reach everyone in the danger zone, not even by half. The event was so close he could read the epicenter out of the immediate future, so he pressed a single driving compulsion into every mind he'd been able to touch. Like a blanket settling over the city streets, the need to be away from the Green Construction office building possessed all at once, a pandemonium of flight following. It was surreal, the chaos of hundreds of people fleeing through the busy city streets, but none of the noise, everyone so stunned by their own involuntary actions that they proceeded in complete silence. At least at first.

The compulsion, as such things tend to, began to spread like an ethereal disease through the crowds, the latent telepathic energies of the mob mentality making itself useful for once, hopping the need to flee from mind to mind without any further effort from Skye, spreading it to more minds than he could ever have hopped to reach. Everywhere, without even knowing why, people began to press quickly through the streets, running to take covers in alleys, behind corners, in sewer drains, each person reacting to the need for escape slightly differently. Inside buildings, people ducked away from windows, hid under tables, stood in doorways, whatever they could to satisfy the need they'd suddenly acquired. Finally, cars in the streets sped away, ignoring traffic laws in one big group of fleeing vehicles. Thank whoever you want that there were no traffic jams tonight.

Just before the compulsion could reach the far side of the building, an almost empty area with some small businesses and storefronts below office space, Skye's danger sense flared almost uncontrollably, and he grabbed an antenna for support while bracing himself. There was a nova of power that Skye saw as a yellow splash, then the world heaved, a blast that would have blown his ears out from any closer roaring over the landscape, and he suddenly had a _lot_ more to worry about.

From what little he could sense in the after-image of yellow power that permeated the air, a spire of stone had blasted through the building diagonal from his perch. The two buildings being around the same height, flying stone became the object of his clairvoyance and danger sense quite completely the next moment. As each flare of his danger sense clued him in, Skye made some small motion to avoid the rain of death that the spire had kicked into the air. With a backward roll from the antenna, he avoided a hunk of masonry that clipped the metal stalk short, then he was forced to roll to his side as a series of stone hunks began pummeling the roof of his building. With a quick flip to his feet he dodged a slice of metal that would have decapitated him on the ground, then dodged to the side with a long lean to avoid another flying rock. He had gotten about halfway through the storm of projectiles when another unreal flash of power bloomed on the building Raven had boarded, distracting him through sheer amazement from the task at hand.

The whole sky was suddenly crowded with power, the emanations of a black energy edged with red rage, tasting so completely of the lower dimensions that Skye had a horrifying and irrational fear that a dimension rift had opened on top of the next building. A scream from his danger sense brought him back just in time for him to stop a storm of falling pebbles from lacerating his face by blocking with his armored hands. Slicing stones still managed to rip his cloths and skin open in a dozen places, but the pummel of rocks on his gauntlets sounded like bullets zinging off of steel, so he was glad he'd managed to block in time.

The instant he was safe again, he turned to stare at the rooftop Raven had gone to occupy, and his senses were just barely able to recognize the black power on the roof as her own. It had taken on a new aspect, a different core personality that altered the overall feel of her energy to something entirely different, and Skye was simply incapable of understanding how that could have happened. Was it something the creators of this catastrophe had done to her? His confusion was so acute that he nearly missed the final flash of his danger sense, managing to raise his hand to catch a flying piece of plastic before it clocked him in the head. After a moment of cool shock at the near miss, he looked at what he held—a toilet seat, of all things—then discarded the offending bathroom fixture as he looked again to the next roof.

The building was well within the range of his aura view _and_ his telepathic touch, but the miasma of Raven's power and rage made any attempt to view with those futile at best. It was just too far away to use clairvoyance, only the most fuzzy of images available to his otherwise all-penetrating gaze. So, with a little bit of reservation, he collapsed to a sitting position and stuck his head between his bent knees, allowing his spirit to leave his body the moment he had stabilized. His consciousness free to the world, he zipped at thought speed to an observational point above the next building, gazing down at the ghastly scene below.

The source of the raging power was evident, a twisted amalgamation of spiritual energy, thaumaturgic shaping structures, and pure demonic force. His clairvoyance, now that he was closer, could perceive that Raven existed somewhere within that beast, her body so enveloped in the swirling powers that twisted the form of her cloak that she was barely visible to any simpler vision. There was nothing human about the hate that emanated from her and polluted the air, it was the sole presence of the worst kind of demonic power, the kind that haunted the very lowest dimensions and hungered to infect places that had yet to feel its lust for destruction. By straining his aura vision to the limit of his ability, Skye could sense the way the white energy, that which usually contained her soul's black power, was overwhelmed and restrained within a red power that tasted of pure demon, of something not _truly_ native to Raven's soul.

His insights into what exactly her terrible burden was all about were cut off by the action at hand, as Raven's black tentacles of power attempted to wrench a flying platform out of the air. The beings he had sensed so hastily as the probable cause of the disaster occupied the stone, which, to his senses, glowed with the same spiritual energy as the murderous pinnacle had. The killers on the rock wore artificial mind shields so powerful that Skye could barely perceive their auras, but that fact became secondary to the weapon the taller male one pulled the next moment. Skye had just enough time to wonder, with a flash of _pure_ _terror_, where the FUCK the man had gotten one of _those_ before he was forced to take action, striking out with a telepathic warning to Raven that was burned away by the heat of rage surrounding her psyche. His last gambit failed, he watched helplessly as the line of disruption energy, a kind of thought wave harmful only to senstives, struck Raven down, even as she attempted to transform the pair into so much bloody meat.

As the scrambler beam struck her aura, Raven was thrown into a massive convulsion of agony, all the power and rage she'd been so completely controlled by dissipating instantly as the core of her soul was stabbed with a waveform completely the antithesis to all spiritual energy. Her suddenly normal body fell gracelessly to the ground and began twitching and shaking in a seizure as her body reacted to the supreme violation of her spirit. She vomited violently the small contents of her stomach as she twitched on her side, eyes wide open and blankly staring out at the world. Skye wondered at the small mercy that she'd gone to the bathroom recently enough that she didn't soil herself as he had the time he'd been scrambled, then snapped out of his horrified trance and raced down to contact Raven's unconscious mind, determined that whatever this villain (who's flying platform now landed back on the WaneCorp building's rooftop) intended to do now, he'd not find a helpless target in Raven.

(Raven)

Raven didn't so much open her eyes, which had never closed, as she did suddenly become aware of the world again. The return to her senses was instant and complete, and she had enough time to wonder why she smelled vomit before an evil voice began to monologue over her.

"Ah yes, it would seem that this scrambler beam was well worth the exorbitant price that alien arms dealer demanded for it," he said, and Raven remembered in a flash where she was and what had happened. "Now, I have _two_ of the Titan Girls under my power… an unexpected treat on what I expected to be a night of nothing but work." Raven wondered who he was talking to, then remembered the presence of Terra, impossible though it seemed, and had just barely enough of the roof in her field of view that she could see where the thin woman stood motionlessly on the platform she'd been flying around. Raven tried to move, to shout her hate out at the betrayer who had been out doing her dirty deeds the entire time they'd been trying to cure her statue, but found herself immobile, a sudden presence making itself known in her mind.

"_Raven, I've brought you back from unconsciousness_," said Skye's mental voice, "_but you were hit by a scrambler. I'm blocking your connection to your nerves because otherwise the agony would drag you back under again, and now I'm setting up a bypass so you'll be able to move. Sit tight, and get ready to go_." He didn't wait for an answer from her, but got back to work. Her outrage at having him in her mind was overtaken by Slade's voice, which continued to talk.

"To think, a power like hers brought low by this little alien toy. Now, I'm free to do with her as I please, much as I was with you after I'd gotten those pesky powers of yours under my thumb with the electronic nervous bypass… right Terra?" Raven listened intently, but Terra simply continued to stand silently on the stone, and Raven couldn't help but wonder what had happened to her. The young woman had always been slim, but the body suit she wore was tight enough that Raven could see her ribs sticking out, and nowhere was there the hard muscle that Raven remembered from their previous encounters. With a shock, she realized that Terra didn't blink, didn't twitch, didn't move a single inch while she stood, just continued to stare silently directly forward.

"Oh, that's right, you haven't been feeling very talkative lately, have you Terra? My but it will be most difficult to reminisce about the old days, as long as you're quiet like that. How will we go over the months of torture, or all the wonderful screams I tore from your body? The red hot coals… the cattleprod… the meat hook… or maybe… my surgical experiments?" Slade stopped here for a moment, having caused no change whatsoever in Terra with his words. Raven meanwhile felt an incredible emptiness begin to form in her mind, a pit of numbness that was her mind trying to shield her from realizing what Slade was talking about, some instinct knowing that an understanding of what exactly Slade was saying would break Raven right now. Slade stopped to examine Terra's expression carefully, then continued to talk to the statue-like super.

"Incredible… Blood's mindwipe job has brought an amazing change in you my dear. Not even at the height of my brain washing's effect were you so utterly under my control. Hmm… maybe he can do the same with this other little girl," and he turned back to look at Raven's motionless body. "If he lacks the power to break her, then perhaps she can replace you as my toy… seeing as you wouldn't be any fun, so tragically cut off from your ability to _suffer_. A little cranial surgery could contain her powers quite nicely, and then she'd make a perfect replacement for you—don't you agree?"

As Raven realized that he was trying to test the boundaries of Terra's blankness, the protective numbness began to give away in the face of the terrible reality Slade was describing. Torture… brain washing… mindwipe... it all lead in one indescribably terrible direction. However else it had seemed, whatever else had been true or a lie, Terra had been resisting Slade, working against him, and had suffered unimaginably for it. And they'd just left her with him. Months. He'd had _months_ alone with her, both thought dead in the volcano, a statue the only remaining trace, and they'd _left her alone with him_ for all that time. Despite Skye's nerve block, tears began to roll freely down her immobile, impassive face, pouring from her eyes as her heart began to break under the utter enormity of her failure, unable to take the weight of her own betrayal of Terra. No one, not even the most remorseless traitor, deserved what the woman had suffered, and now it was too late, her mind destroyed, and Raven likely to suffer the same fate.

"Ah but these Titans are so deluded," Slade continued, now apparently just for the sake of gloating over his own sadistic accomplishments. "Did you hear her Terra? She thought you were still loyal to me, that you were helping me willingly, that you would be my weapon to murder my enemies of your own free will. Even after that pathetic attempt at betraying me you put forth in the volcano, the one that set me back so far, the one that I _beat you to within an inch of oblivion_ for, she would still assume that you were as evil as I. Such a sickeningly poetic end it would be, if they never realized how truly loyal you've been to them this whole time, if you were to die before they could apologize for thinking you a lifelong traitor. Such resistance you put up during my ministrations, such incredible spine you showed, vowing to never help me again, no matter how many times I brought you near to death, submerged you into a delirium of agony. Alas, if only your mind was intact to suffer this final understanding of how futile that loyalty was, that it was never known, never even hoped for by the only people you cared about, back when you _could_ care about things."

Slade seemed to be in an evil ecstasy of some kind, the more he considered what that agony would have been to Terra, the more pleasure he received. Raven's mind was beginning to stagnate with horror, the inconsolable prison of her currently limited existence denying her even the release of screaming or the revenge of destroying Slade. Death was too good for him, _torture_ was too good for him, and she staved off insanity by imagining the satisfaction it would bring to dump him into a dark pit of the hell dimensions where he could suffer for a veritable eternity.

"_Done_," Skye's presence finally returned, "_You can move now_."

"_I thought you'd never say that,_" Raven responded with relief, a semblance of coherence returning to her mind as her utter helplessness ended. She tried to fire up her powers, to ambush Slade and get his punishment underway, but got absolutely no response from the well of force within her. She nearly snapped right then and there, but managed to hold it together long enough to bitch.

"_My powers aren't working_," she sent the thought with a venomous singsong tone, redirecting her impotent anger at Slade and herself to Skye for his inability to help her in this. Skye took the burning anger stoically, his position within her mind giving him full access to its origin, and thus he couldn't be upset about it. None the less, he _had_ to get her moving.

"_Raven, he shot you with a fucking A-Class scrambler. If the fact that it didn't drop you out of that demonic rage trip in a single blast doesn't tip you off to how badly it damaged you, then let me reinforce the lesson by telling you that if you hadn't been shielded by whatever it was that possessed you, you probably wouldn't ever fully recover from the wounds. That thing is a travesty against nature, a tool created from the harvested brain cells of beings possessing the power of antipsi, designed to eradicate the connections between your mind, body, and soul. I'm a mind-healer, not a miracle worker, and it's everything I can do just to get your body barely working right now, lord only knows how long it'll take us to make you better—now get the hell out of there!_"

"_NO_!" she thought with force, her rage replaced by bitter sadness and guilt, "_we can't leave Terra in his hands… not again… not after I heard that. We have to find some way to save her_!" Without realizing it, Raven was taking full advantage of the fact that, with her powers all shot to hell, she could feel as much as she wanted to. It was one of fate's cruel twists that it should happen when there was naught but misery in her soul.

"_Terra's safety is nearly assured now that her mind has been wiped. We can save her later and she won't be any worse for wear than she already is, but we can't say the same thing about you! I can't get up there, and their mind shields are too good for my powers to work at this range, so I'm helpless here. Later, I won't be, and we can get her back together, with the others for backup. Now please, GO_!"

Raven thought she felt an ache in her heart as she processed Skye's compassionless analysis, so much like the ones she always meted out when the other Titans became too emotional, knowing that he was right. Of course, that was impossible, because all sensation was still gone from her body, a fact she appreciated when she remembered the unreal pain the scrambler had caused. With a quiet grunt of effort, she shakily pulled her head from the puddle of her own vomit and began to drag herself to her feet, her balance completely destroyed by the numbness. It was a tribute to how unexpected her movement was that Slade didn't detect it until _after_ she'd regained her feet.

"What in the hell?" asked Slade detachedly, when he noticed that she was standing. He looked askance at his scrambler, wondering if he'd used it improperly, or more likely, if the weapons dealer had robbed him. "You weren't supposed to wake up after that blast for at least a week. I'm impressed."

"I have more resources than you know," she managed to make her voice steady and calm, though the trouble she was having moving right now allowed her to truly feel neither. "Now that I've heard that little monologue of yours, there's no way we'll let you keep Terra. You may have tricked us, used her up, and destroyed her mind… but I will rot in hell before I let you keep her body as your weapon."

"Ah, little witch, little witch, don't delude yourself. By some miracle or another, you were able to overcome my weapon and stand when you should be near death, but you can _barely_ move… how do you expect to escape from me? How exactly do you plan to save her when _you can't even save yourself_?"

"_Well Skye_?" Raven asked him, as she wondered the exact same thing. She'd expected enough mobility to run away, or at least enough to walk, but she _really was_ barely standing.

"_There's a ledge about ten steps behind you. Back away from Slade slowly, make him think you're just afraid of him. When you get to the ledge, jump, and I'll take care of the rest._"

"_Skye_?" she asked worriedly, not having the slightest idea what he was planning. Then again, she wouldn't exactly have to pretend to be afraid of Slade with her body like this, so she picked the lesser of two evils and placed her trust in Skye's plan as she began to back away from the towering villain before her.

Walking was a terror, and backing away was worse. She couldn't feel where her legs were, and this made taking a step back a work of complete faith. Only a mild burning sensation that ran through her whole body, most likely the residue of agony that Skye's nerve block couldn't compensate for, let her know where any given part of her was, and she used it as much as possible to avoid falling flat on her ass and handing Slade all the time he'd need to sweep her up into the living nightmare that had already consumed Terra. After she'd counted ten times of wanting her legs to step backward, something confirmed more by the way Slade had grown more distant from her than what she could feel from her body, Raven paused at what she hoped was the precipice of the tower.

"Come now Raven, there is no escape. If you desire, I can knock you out swiftly and you won't have to wait long at all before your introduction to your new life of misery." Slade was advancing on her slowly, a look of expectation in his one slanted eye. If ever anything could compel Raven to put her complete trust in Skye, it was the hunger in Slade's eye.

"Remember Slade," she responded quietly, her voice dripping with threat she didn't have to fake, "I will never forgive you for what you did to Terra—_I will see you burn for all eternity_!"

That final promise made, Raven willed her knees to bend and then pushed off with all the strength she could summon. She had a final view of a furious Slade leaping out to catch her before she was falling backward, the blank city sky her only view.

(Skye)

Skye's clairvoyance gave him a perfect image of Raven as she plummeted from the tower next to his. Her limp, cloaked form was invisible against the night sky, and if not for his extra senses, Skye's plan would have been impossible. In the end, it would turn out that Raven's rescue was owed more to indescribably lucky coincidence than anyone's personal effort.

For example, the buildings were next to one another on a city block, separated by an alley rather than a full street, which made the distance between the two something like fifteen feet. Thus, it was possible, using his clairvoyance as a guide, for Skye to make a desperate, full-power flying leap from the roof of his building, catch Raven in one arm as he flashed toward the solid wall of glass before him, flip forward with bent knees, and plant his feet on the side of the WaneCorp building.

With strain of great effort, he was able to ignore the hideous shocking pain of gripping her so closely for long enough to put every ounce of his strength into kicking off of the building. As he twisted through a backflip with his badly injured cargo, he released the grip, allowing her to fly gracelessly into a waiting window cleaner's scaffold, landing hard after the dangerously long drop. Fighting off unconsciousness, he used his remaining good hand to catch and grip fiercely to the steel cable that ran down to the scaffold's wench, sliding down far faster than even he'd feared with a flash of sparks from his mesh gloves. In a moment, he'd been enveloped by the gray mist of masonry dust that had billowed up form the wrecked building across the street, fading from view. As all real visibility ceased, only the fact that he used clairvoyance allowed him to leap from the cable into a roll just in time to avoid breaking something on the ground-mounted scaffold wench.

As he lay flat on his back in a supply-access alley, he was possessed by the fact that, despite the burn of a dozen cuts, the agony in the arm he'd gripped Raven with, the stinging heat in his opposite hand from cable burn that had even penetrated his gauntlets, and the whole-body ache his landing had earned him, this job wasn't done yet. Quickly going OOB (out of body), he sent his mind up, up, back to the scaffold, looking in to make sure he hadn't killed Raven with his obscenely risky 'rescue.' Sensing instantly that her soul was still firmly attached to her body, he went further up still, finding Slade staring down into black chasm that was the space between the buildings after the localized blackout his strike had caused.

He stared down, emotions invisible to Skye's senses, but possessing an indescribable tension in his form that spoke of true frustration. The next moment, he turned and signaled to the blank one, the one that Raven had called Terra, the same one that had so many mixed emotions attached to her among the Titans. The two sped off on their flying stone, and Skye, pressed by the urgency of Raven's condition, deigned not to follow them, but rather marked the platform they rode with a powerful infusion of his own spirit energy, hoping to trace them later on.

Returning swiftly to his body, Skye peeled himself off the asphalt, bemoaning his battered body even as he used the well of emptiness in his soul to stave off panic at what Raven's status was. Moving over to the auxiliary wench controls, he popped the hatch off with a screwdriver someone had left on the ground nearby, had Vera explain to him how to hotwire it, then got the thing descending. Unable to wait, he reached a thought tendril out and contacted her, finding her in particularly bad way, his nerve block having just worn off.

"_Skye… the next time… you want to rescue me… from certain death… —oh never mind_," she said the moment she felt his mind touch hers, and he could feel pain like a haze of orange fog in her thoughts, shock having dulled it enough for her to think in the limited way she was managing. He supposed she was having trouble deciding if a slow torturous existence leading to certain death or mind destruction was preferable to the indescribable hurt she felt right now.

"_Hold on. I can fix this_," Skye said, and began to work on himself as he waited for her to arrive on the ground. Opening further the empty pit of his vampiric core, he let all the pain in his body drain away into it, careful not to numb himself so far as to hinder his movement. By the time he was finished, the scaffold had reached the ground floor, clanging to a stop next to him, a nearly delusional mystic its only occupant.

"Okay Miss Raven, it's your turn now," he said aloud as he carefully pulled her from the scaffold and lay her out in the pitch black alley. As long as he held her with the special metal of the gauntlets, the reaction between their sprits couldn't take place, so he managed to spare her any further agony on that count.

Without waiting for any response from her, seeing as she was so far beyond coherence at this point that it wouldn't have made any sense, he got to work on draining the pain out of her. Very carefully, he placed his hands on either side of her head as he kneeled near her. Careful not to suck up any of her spirit, he drew the pain steadily from every part of her body, destroying it continuously in the endlessly hungry disposal unit of his soul. Soon, he knew that she could truly feel nothing but a mild coolness through every inch of her being, and the consciousness that had been so tortured for the past few minutes (his wake up job had left her unable to pass out) was granted a respite at last.

"Skye…" she said as the relief washed through her, in a completely relaxed tone that he'd never heard from her before, "I love you."

"Raven, that's the post-traumatic euphoria talking, don't confuse love with how happy you are to not hurt anymore. And hey, try not to say anything you'll get angry over and toast me for later."

"Hehehehe!" she actually giggled at his completely deadpan gag, and he was struck by an incredible surge of attraction out of nowhere. He broke out in a cold sweat as the urge to use his clairvoyance to once more pour over the magnificence of her physical form washed through him, then smacked himself harshly to dispel that course of thought. He'd be damned if he'd let his powers lead him around by the gonads, and this was _so_ not the time for it anyway.

"What was that sound?" she asked, and he realized, almost for the first time, that it was beyond dark down here. Oh the things you miss when you don't use eyes.

"That was the sound of an idiot getting his just desserts, don't let it worry you. Now, we need to call your friends… I'm getting the feeling that this night is far from over for any of us. How do you normally—" was as far as he got before a sudden beeping noise started blaring out of Raven, accompanied by a blinking from various items that Skye had thought were jewelry. The noise wasn't really that loud, but after the unreal silence that followed the disaster, it might as well have been an air horn. Doubtless the silence would soon be broken by all kinds of unpleasant sounds, but immediately after the disaster, the site had been quiet as the grave it truly was. In any case, Skye nearly jumped out of his skin at the first sound, then tracked down its source and pulled the Titan communicator carefully from Raven's prone form. He flipped it open and got an image of Robin's masked face instantly.

"Raven, where the heck are you? There was an alert and you weren't in the—Skye?"

Skye was forced to cringe away from the lighted LCD image on the communicator screen, suddenly realizing that he'd lost his sunglasses somewhere back during the acrobatics. The pitch black of the alley had made it easy to forget. He looked out into the shadows as he answered then.

"Hey Robin, sorry to have worried you, but Raven and I are already at the scene. We were… working things out on the roof when I got a vision of this happening. There wasn't time to get the rest of you."

"What? What the hell is going on out there?"

"Some guy named Slade—"

"_SLADE_? _He's back_? I _KNEW_ IT!" Robin cut Skye off completely, apparently overcome by some emotion or another at the knowledge that this Slade guy had started operating in the city again. Vindication, or something like that.

"Yeah, but as you can see, we couldn't quite stop him. Listen man, get out here, _now_—we'll need everyone's help for the rescue operation. I was clearing people out of the streets with my powers before hand, but I don't even want to _think_ about how many were buried alive… or how many just outright died." Skye's voice trailed of to a sadness that his PV was too charged up for him to really feel. Using it too much was as bad as not feeding it as far as icing his soul went.

"_Damn that Slade_! How could he _do_ something like this!? We'll…we'll be there soon, Starfire is flying ahead and the rest of us will arrive by vehicle, so sit tight and try to help where you can. Now… where's Raven?"

"She's with me, and she's safe, if not quite sound. While I was clearing the streets, she tried to take out Slade before he could commit this… this… _atrocity_. I don't know how, but he got his hands on some seriously rare alien hardware, particularly a little crime against nature known as a scrambler. It a kind of beam gun that only works on sensitives, people with ESP like Raven and me. To make a long story short, it was a miserable brush with death followed by exceptional agony. I did what I could, and she's stabilized now, but I'm not sure how long it'll take to get her back on her feet."

"Raven… shit!" Robin cursed sadly, probably mounting that much more hate for the villain Slade, with whom he obviously had quite a history. "Can you two use that quick heal on her? We're going to need all the help we can get on this."

"I don't know if it would work in the first place, and really, I'm not sure if she can use any of her powers at all right now anyway. In any case, there's more you need to know. That girl Terra you were trying to tell me about earlier? Well I don't know where she's _supposed_ to be, but where she _is_ is with Slade!"

"WHAT? _How_… _why_… WHAT?"

"And that's not all. Once again, I don't know how, but that bastard managed to _mindwipe_ her. She's a blank—a mindless, remorseless, weapon of mass destruction."

"_Gahhrrr_!" Robin shouted in utter frustration, managing to express all kinds of impotent rage and hate in a single bellow. For a moment Skye was afraid he'd been mistaken in laying it all on the young leader at once, but Robin contained his paroxysm of emotion the next moment and launched into a rave of a sort.

"_He tricked us_! He tricked us and _we fell for it_! Terra… poor Terra… alone with him… I can't even… _NO_!" and he covered his face with his hand, as though it would shield him from how terribly they'd failed her.

"Robin, we'll get her back, okay? I managed to place a tracer of a sort on their transportation, so after we get this disaster under control we can go after him and rescue her. And man, you're talking to one of the galaxy's most talented mind healers, remember? I won't make any promises I can't keep, but I can assure that if it's within my power to restore her memories, I won't rest until I have, okay?"

"Skye…" and Robin seemed overcome by emotion once more, though Skye didn't care to guess at this one.

"Just get out here. It isn't pretty and—"

Skye paused as his danger sense flared wildly, impelling him to jump backward for his very life. When he landed again, his senses told him that something freaky was going on with Raven, something involving a demonic red aura, and his guts twisted in surprise at the power that suddenly sprung out and obliterated the area where he'd been standing. Only his extra senses let him detect the difference between the alley's palpable darkness and the truly solid black of Demon-Raven's sprit energy, and once again he owed his life to his danger sense, the stuff he'd dodged being more than enough to fry him beyond hope.

"OH SHIT! _Get out here Robin_!" he shouted into the communicator before cutting the connection to the stunned boy wonder and pocketing it. Meanwhile, a sickeningly hateful presence filled the alleyway much as it had filled the sky only moments ago. Skye felt fear begin to well up in his mind at the sheer malice of the mind he faced, and he cranked his PV to ice his soul, more afraid of how fear would affect him than how being emotionless would. The vision of terror rising from the puddle of blacker than black was possessed of horrendous power, and had it been almost anyone but Raven, Skye would have turned tail and come back with an army at least. As it was, that option simply didn't exist, or so said his ESP driven instincts. The next moment, Demon-Raven was up, its distorted form turning to confront the powerful mind it sensed.

"WHAT DO WE HAVE HERE?" rumbled a terrible mockery of Raven's voice as four slanted red eyes stared down at Skye. "SO THIS IS THE MORTAL SCUM THAT WE OWE OUR VESSEL'S QUICK RECOVERY TO?"

"Alright shit-face, who the hell are you and what have you done with Raven?" queried Skye coldly, a complete change overtaking him as he drained the last bit of feeling from his soul. Even in the face of the spine-chilling evil that was manifesting before him, Skye was cold, the very image of calm, collected, and dangerous.

"HA! THE MORTAL HAS SPINE! IT AMUSES US!" bellowed the inhuman creature as it towered over him. Having arisen not from Raven's rage, but from her complete loss of control over her power, the creature acted wholly independent of her will, not even almost being representative of the woman Skye knew. What he saw now, he was quite sure, was naught but a demon talking through Raven's mouth, a beast using her body and soul as a medium to penetrate from the hell dimensions.

"I'm only going to ask you one more time," and the ice in his voice could have chilled lava, "who the hell are you, and what have you done with Raven?"

"WHAT IS THIS? RAVEN DID NOT TELL YOU OF HER BETTER SIDE? I TOO AM RAVEN; NOT THE WEAK, SIMPERING MORTAL YOU KNOW, BUT HER _HATE_, THAT WHICH MAKES HER CHILD OF TRIGON THE TERRIBLE, DESTROYER OF DIMENSIONS!"

"Please. I've known of Raven's demon side since the moment I saw her. Your kind's stink has a habit of tainting even the most beautiful of souls." Normally, Skye would have been intimidated by the unbridled force flowing off this creature's aura—hell, _anyone_ with the _slightest_ instinct of self preservation would have been terrified, but with his soul iced, doubt and fear were only _two_ of the things he didn't have to worry about anymore.

"FOOL! HOW DARE YOU INSULT US? YOU WILL BE THE FIRST TO DIE, THEN ALL INHABITANTS OF THIS DIMENSION WILL FOLLOW!" and the creature struck out with a black tentacle, attempting to decapitate him with a blade of spirit energy. Sensing the attack coming, Skye took a small sidestep to avoid it, then struck out with a single ribbon to pierce the blade, dragging a mild shriek of pain from the beast.

"Shut up and listen you!" Skye said fearlessly, and the Demon's utter amazement at his bravado actually prompted it to obey momentarily. "Do you think your paltry power impresses me? I saw the way that scrambler dropped you in a single blast, and something that will fail in the face of that is hardly something to be frightened of!"

"GRRR!" the demon growled in frustration and perhaps embarrassment, Skye having found exactly the right button to push, "WE FAILED ONLY BECAUSE THE WEEKLING STILL HELD US BACK FROM FULFILLING THE MURDER SHE SO WANTED! WITHOUT HER INTERFERENCE WE ARE FAR MORE POWERFUL!"

"Give me a break! I'll bet your 'incredible power' couldn't even reorganize the mind-soul-body connections that scrambler beam fucked over and expelled you with."

"STUPID MORTAL! WE HAVE ALREADY REPAIRED WHAT THAT PATHETIC TOY HAD DONE TO US! OUR POWER IS TOO GREAT TO BE RESTRAINED BY SUCH TRIFALS!"

"Fine, I was just making sure," and Skye would have felt a thrill of victory at the Demon's slip up, if he was capable of feeling anything at all. "In that case, maybe you _are_ worth my time. If you think you can take me… then come get me."

The demon complied with a shriek of hate, twisting through the air toward him, distorting wildly as its cloaked body stretched out to strike at him. From every direction at once, black tentacles arced out to impale him, one after another leaping forth to skewer his body or beat him to the ground. Following his danger sense, he dodged and flipped with incredible grace, twisting and turning through the web of black death, bounding down the wide alley from ground to wall to air, always a ribbon here or there to intercept that which he could not dodge. Soon, the beast was livid with uncontrollable murderous rage, jetting forward with a dozen tentacles at once to grip him with destructive energy.

Unable to dodge the solid wall of power, Skye enveloped himself in ribbons before the monster could touch the murderous black spirit energy to his flesh, and soon he was coated in the black energy as it pressed in around him, binding him tight. Thousands upon thousands of pounds of telekinetic force crushed away at him, and the effort or resisting it was grinding his mind to dust, but still Skye felt not the slightest hint of distress. He even began to mock the monster that had nearly killed him now.

"What, is that all you've got?" he asked, as he felt the last vestiges of his strength well up for a final effort. The taunt brought still greater rage from the beast, and it leaned forward to answer him up close and personal, its four red eyes glaring into his silver albino pools.

"MORTAL DOG, YOU WILL DIE NOW, AND I WILL SUCK YOU DOWN TO THE PITS OF THE LOWER DIMENSIONS WHERE YOU WILL BE SLOWLY CONSUMED BY THE GREAT TRIGON AS HE PREPARES TO FEAST ON _YOUR_ DIMENSION!"

Skye played his last desperate ploy then, burning out his power to lash a ribbon of concentrated thought through the black bindings that held his left arm. In a flash of movement, he reached up and grabbed the demon by the face, yanking it forward until it was only inches from his own.

"Not if I eat you first," he said, and cracked its head onto his, touching his chakra to hers, right on the jewel she's set to it. With none of the reservation he usually exercised when activating the draining, he unleashed its full fury on the demonic creature currently occupying Raven's body. Instantly the beast tried to pull away, to separate itself from the prey that had suddenly mutated into a predator, but to no avail, Skye's powerful grip fueled by the knowledge that his life rested on this single attack.

Shrieking with such a fury that blood began to drip from Skye's ears, the demon began to fail, the hate that fueled its existence in this plane draining away to the oblivion in Skye's soul, weakening its grip on the rest of Raven's consciousness dramatically. As his ESP had allowed him to predict, the moment the beast's control faltered, _she_ began to resurface, helping him to fight the monster back down to the pit of her unconscious where it was supposed to remain forever bound. As the draining dragged on, the beast's shriek died out, the twisted form began to shrink down to Raven's normal body, and the four slanted red eyes faded into two big violet orbs. At long last then, the creature gave out, it's last piteous wails of frustration audible only on a telepathic level, Raven left kneeling opposite Skye, heads pressed together. Any potential romance of the moment was ruined by the sudden shock of power that blasted him back off of her and onto the ground. He did not move.

"Skye?" asked Raven, when she could finally find it in herself to speak.

(Raven)

It had been the final heart crushing touch on the worst experience of her recent memory. As she'd lain in an ecstasy of numbness after her ordeal of pain, floating along on a wave of relief greater than any drug high she could imagine possible, the Hate in her soul had found its way back into the forefront. Had she not been pressed by more immediate concerns, it would have very quickly occurred to her to wonder what happened to the rage when it was expelled artificially rather than being fought down as she had always had to control it in the past. As it was, she'd found out the hard way, without ever expecting it.

She supposed she should be grateful in a sense, the way the demon side of her soul had regenerated the horrific damage the scrambler had done to her spirit and her mind's connection to her powers like it was nothing at all probably saved her from a terrible inconvenience there. On the other hand, that it had reemerged twice as powerful as before and taken her unprepared and vulnerable from her recuperations kind of killed her desire to show any gratitude. It had overwhelmed her, more completely than ever before, as utterly as only her deepest nightmares could possibly have predicted, and she had lost all control over it. It was the first step to the end of this universe, and _it had happened_.

Drowned in hate, her body and powers had taken on a new will, her very mind submerging in a pool of bloodlust and fury that she'd bound and shielded and warded with every power at her command for as long as she'd lived. It had been like being forced to watch as you transform into a different person, then feeling that which was you begin to fade away as the new person moved around in your body. She'd had just enough time to see herself turn on Skye before she knew no more.

When next she felt, it was to realize the hate was leaving her, draining away in torrent that defied her understanding. Never had it faltered like this, never had it fled from the forefront of her consciousness with so little effort, and in the next moment she was within her mind, opening her eyes to look at the representation of her spirit she'd constructed during all those countless hours of meditation. She was standing in the mental box she had created to contain the Hate, wrapped in the very bonds she placed anew upon the Hate with every meditation session. The core of her consciousness, that which was truly her, which had divided itself into the various partitioned emotions for self-preservation, busted through the weakened bonds with ease and instantly split back into the various aspects of emotion, Happy, Timid, Brave, and all the rest.

Freed from the prison of her mind, Raven and her aspects elevated to the core, advancing quickly to the portal that marked the way back into the outside world. As one they leveled their powers on the portal and began to pull Hate back through and away from her position of control. When the red-cloaked, four eyed aspect was finally wrenched back into the subconscious, she was still cloaked in a gorgeous silver haze, ribbons and streamers of terrible beauty trailing back through the portal, sucking the power from Hate even as Raven began to bind her once more. When the bindings were in place, the silver streamers sheared off, ceasing their parasitic draw on Raven's darkest emotion and allowing her to pitch the offending aspect back into the box where she belonged. Raven had wasted no time in returning to command of her body.

The instant she had surfaced from her trance, a shock at her forehead announced the presence of Skye, whose body she could hear falling back and onto the ground. At first she wasn't sure she'd fully regained command, because even with her eyes open she couldn't see, and she felt none of the injury she'd been left with when the Hate had consumed her. It was not until she reconciled herself to the facts that it was black as her own spirit in the alley and that she'd been healed somehow that she ventured a word.

"Skye?" she asked, and it carried only the neutral tone she addressed everyone with. "Are you alright?" she tried again, but as before got no response from the utterly dark alley.

Pulling herself to her feet, she looked around, searching for any gleam of light at all in the dust-choked chasm they occupied. Suddenly, she caught the slightest red twinkling, and she leaned down to bring it closer, her eyes feasting on the first thing other than black they'd seen since her last look at Slade's vicious visage. Her limited ESP placed the twin lights in collusion with where Skye's eyes should be on the large man's aura, and she reached out unthinkingly to shake wakefulness into his still form. As one might expect, her hands were burnt back by a shock the instant she touched him, and she cursed in pain as she shook some feeling back into her fingers. More carefully then, she used her powers to lift him on a telekinetic stretcher, pulling him into the air next to her. Reaching out to the right, she came to a plain stone wall, and she felt her way along it carefully as she navigated over tumbled rocks.

There was a faint light growing ahead of her, spotlights from rescue helicopters that had only now arrived on the scene, their rotors blowing the clouds of dust away in ever expanding circles, exposing the night once more to Raven's view. As she looked down then at the limp body with its glowing red eyes, she felt a sickening concern grow in her stomach. She couldn't help but fear for the safety of a guy that, for lack of a better way of putting it, had just saved the universe… from her.

Disaster Site, a few minutes later

"Friend Skye? Why do you not answer? Raven, what has happened to him?" asked a very concerned Starfire as she stood over Skye's prone form. Hey lay now on an extra gurney Raven had commandeered from an ambulance as it passed through to whisk the first load of injured persons to the hospital. Heavier equipment had arrived when the magnitude of the emergency became apparent, and minor injuries were being treated at a field hospital just getting set up at the outskirts of the destruction. Raven, knowing nothing they could do for him would help, had declined all offers of medical aid for Skye, leaving him in a peaceful corner of the hospital as she moved to put her enormous telekinetic powers behind the preliminary rescue work. By the time Starfire arrived, she'd just gotten started clearing fallen stone into dump trucks to free up the main thoroughfare so emergency vehicles could get through.

"I… he… he helped me out when I was in trouble, and now he's hurt Starfire. I… it's my fault he's like this." Raven used the same monotone as always, but the hesitation in her words was something new, and Starfire felt a terrible fear for Skye's safety at the way his injury had affected Raven.

"Friend Skye, please awaken! It is I, Starfire, you were going to help free Heartwind for me, do you not remember? You cannot sleep now, we all are in need of your aid!" As she begged for his return to consciousness, she leaned over him, the completely limp and lifeless set of his body terrifying her slightly. Only Raven's assurances that he still lived could keep her from assuming the worst.

"Starfire, you need to calm down. I… I'm pretty sure he's only resting," Raven admonished her, and she somehow managed to make it sound far more certain than her actual words implied.

"Raven, he does not move, he barely breaths, there is no true life in his body! The mentrans are in the spingle but there is no one to mind the hostog!" Tears began to run down her cheeks as she finished this oddly mixed Tamaranean/English saying, and Raven felt some of the uncertainty in her own mind boil up at the other woman's distress.

"Starfire, it's okay. Do you remember how I've gone into trances after taking bad injuries in the past?" Raven waited a moment for the distraught woman to nod, then continued, "Well, I remember him telling me that, when he's badly injured, he retreats to the astral plane to repair his mind. He's probably just out fixing himself up right now, so there's really nothing to worry about." Once again, she said the words with far more certainty than she actually held herself, but at least it quelled Starfire's tears of distress. "In any case, there isn't time to worry about him now. There are people trapped in that wreckage who need our help, and Skye would want us to attend to them first, alright?"

Raven earned a second small nod of comprehension from Starfire, just in time for the screech of tires to announce another new arrival. The next moment, Cyborg's blue and silver T-Car peeled out around several emergency vehicles and skidded to a stop dangerously close to the medical workers where they unpacked equipment the helicopters had dropped in. Further roaring of engines announced the arrival of the birdcycle, Robin jumping it recklessly over some piled rubble to land it in a heap of broken glass that its special tires took without the slightest complaint. Their leader hopped out, issued orders for Cyborg and Beast Boy to find the disaster relief coordinator and learn what they could do to help, then rushed over to Raven, a million questions evident in his face.

"Raven? What the hell happened? Skye had just told me that you were hurt and he was fine, then he hung up on me with panic in his voice, then I get here and you're fine while he's out of it!" His voice raised to a shout, pent up frustrations and the clear shame that his best efforts to preempt Slade's return had failed both contributing to a state of mind not fit for civil conversation. Raven gave him one of her best looks, the kind that tended to make petty crooks wet themselves, and Robin realized that he was being an ass, apologizing hastily. Starfire looked on in concern, knowing that only Slade could bring this change about in him and fearing as she often did for his health with the way he let the villain get to him.

"The situation changed Robin, and now _I'm_ the one who's not sure how long _Skye_ will be down. I'll tell you about it later," and it was clear to Robin that she didn't want Starfire to hear the details, especially since they hadn't told anyone else about Terra yet, "but right now we should all get to work on the rescue. Come on."

"Raven, wait! What are we supposed to do? I mean, sure, we can move rock around a lot faster than any machines they're liable to get out here any time soon, but I was counting on Skye's ESP find where people were trapped. Cyborg's scanners and Beast Boy's nose can only do so much. You're a psychic too, isn't there anything you can do to help him?"

"_Don't you think I've tried_!" Raven snapped suddenly at his needling, jolting both Robin and Starfire with her vicious outburst. Her eyes clouded and she looked away before continuing, "I didn't ask him to do that for me… he could have just tried to get away… he could have done all kinds of things… but now I owe him, and I can't even help him now that he's hurt." The ache of her own powerlessness penetrated her neutrality without exception, and small pebbles at her feet began to explode in quick crackling succession as her frustration manifested.

"Raven, what happened between you two?" asked Starfire, and her tone was laced with a warm caring that bit straight to Raven's heart.

"I'll tell you later. I will. As for now…" she sighs deeply, a grimace gracing her face as she turned back to them, "there _is_ something I can try. His spirit does not currently occupy his body."

"And? What do you mean?" questioned Robin, much more gently now that he had an idea of just what state of mind she was in.

"It's dangerous, but I can try to tap into his powers. If I can manage it, I'll be able to find people who need rescuing much as he would have."

"Do you think it's worth the risk?" asked Robin, and Raven had to consider the question for a moment.

It was possible to lose one's self in another's mind, especially if it was a power mind, and if she'd ever doubted it before, she knew now that this was a perfect description of Skye's. On the other hand, her preliminary probing into his outer mind had proven unbearably fascinating, the methods and constructions he'd placed within his own psyche being completely unlike anything she herself used. Many of the places she'd used magic in her own mind had been done with pure psi power in his, and the journey through its now unshielded reaches had been an education in telepathic technique that she could never have acquired from the heavily magic-dominated studies she pursued on her own. She felt more than a little guilty about it, but he'd gotten to see hers during her emergency, so she justified it to herself as only fair, thinly concealing how much she desired to delve deeper into his mind from herself this way.

"Yes," she finally responded, deciding that the bottom line was really the lives that would be saved if it worked, and Robin nodded, bowing to her experience in this instance. Without further words, he left her to her work, taking Starfire by the hand to catch up with the others, the Tamaranean looking back at the pair of psychics as she departed.

Within Skye's Mind

As she had during her first examination, Raven let her mind sink into the empty vessel of Skye's body, this time quickly bypassing the outer layers that had so absorbed her attention previously. Once again, she found herself impressed by the supreme organization and compartmentalization of his mind, the entire structure built to exacting specifications much as her own was. Unlike hers, his was not geared toward the buffering of emotion and the containment of barely controllable forces, but rather seemed streamlined for maximum efficiency, a place for everything and everything in its place. If hers was a fortress-prison of divided emotion, his must have been a supercomputer of streamlined processing power. It was quite unlike any mind she'd ever been within, none of the people she'd known with the talent to do this to themselves ever letting her so completely within them. Once again, she felt a little bad for prying like this so very against her nature, but once again she consoled herself with the righteousness of her cause.

Soon, she reached the edge of his outer mind, the boundary that separated it from his deep inner mind, the probable location of the leads she'd need to work his powers. Quashing her last inner complaints, she flowed down into this deeper mind and began to explore.

Almost immediately she noticed an anomaly she wasn't even remotely familiar with, some kind of artificial structure, built of metal and circuits rather than thought energy configurations and neurons. As she examined it, she felt a weird consciousness of a kind, very much unlike anything she'd perceived before, and thus she shied away from that portion of his mind, deciding that caution was the best policy with something like that. He'd mentioned something about a cybernetic implant, but this was nothing like what she'd seen in Cyborg's mind when occasion had brought her there.

The very next thing that came to her attention was another unique construction, a kind of ball of shield energy that hadn't failed, even as his spirit was elsewhere after its injuries. It was currently immense beyond description, taking up so very much of his inner mind that she felt it was little wonder he'd needed to vacate the place. The tiny bit of her own mind she was now threading through his was having a little trouble navigating around it, so she couldn't imagine his whole spirit could fit in here with this mysterious swollen bubble in place.

She advanced on it curiously, then felt a thrill of fear as a familiar emotion began to pulse within her mind, the Hate rebelling violently. She had it under control now, but she wondered at the sudden activation, that is, until she reached out to touch the surface of the shield with her questing thought. The hate had answered the call of its dying essence, she suddenly realized, as it occurred to her that this is where Skye had stored all the horrible power he drained from her. Beyond the shield was a vast ocean of hate, so enormous that it had crowded Skye out of his own mind, and she guessed that it must be this, if not his spiritual damage, that had sent him to his astral beacon for recuperation.

She took one final, much closer look at the shield, using her every wile to gaze past it and into the chasm of emotion within. Just when she was about to give up in disgust at her failure to penetrate the shield of a man who wasn't even around to actively oppose her, she was in, and the mass of Hate nearly jolted with its desire to run down her questing thought and back into its native shell. She staved off the assault, the weakened emotion no match for her very carefully constructed mental contact, and then looked past it all toward the center, seeking to satisfy a curiosity that had consumed her since the moment she realized the opportunity Skye's absence presented her with.

The next moment, she saw it. A sphere, or a circle, or perhaps some shape that couldn't be described by the vocabulary of a three-dimensional world, floating in the ocean of hate, drawing the feeling into itself. She couldn't help but stare at it, this incredible, beautiful, horrifying piece of Skye's soul, sitting amid an emotion that had more than once threatened to consume and destroy her, gobbling it down like so much cherry gelatin. Quickly and surely, it was eradicating her hate, sinking it into the same bottomless pit that had tortured Skye for his entire life. Despite its awful beauty, she was still a little disappointed that the central source of her salvation was so very simplistic, a boundless animal hunger that didn't differentiate between a demonic hate with the potential to eradicate entire dimensions and the average drunken rage of a barroom brawl.

As she exited the cancerously swollen but rapidly shrinking well of hate, she noted the way the shield was structured, interlocking polygons of energy containing the vicious hate, and potentially any other emotion, without even straining. Comparing it to the rather shabby cube she held the Hate within, Raven vowed to reconstruct the prison in her mind to higher specifications, perhaps adding some of the new magical wards she'd been studying as well. This incident had made it painfully clear that new measures were necessary.

She left this portion of his mind behind at last, proceeding in search of that which she needed. In the process, she noticed his memory center, also guarded by a shield in his absence, and decided not to mess with this much more menacing barrier (which was actually oriented to keeping intruders out, rather than emotion in). Now and then she thought she caught flickers of activity within his mind, flashes of movement and thought where none should exist, much like the skittering of basement vermin one can sometimes notice out of the corner of the eye. This became quite disconcerting, though she could detect no malignance around her, and she hurried her search, increasingly worried that the shrewd Skye had placed defenses within his mind to greet people that snooped around while he was OOB.

Finally, she reached his control core, that portion of the inner mind that she represented with a portal and, apparently, he represented with a spectacular crystalline starburst. Rather than plunging in, as she knew this of all things would be trapped, she sent in a single, gentle thought, pressing it into the core with the utmost delicacy, searching for what she needed. This was the moment of truth, whether she succeeded or failed would be determined by this final test.

The questing thought reached into the core and was instantly confronted by a host of defenses, the overall effect being assured mental meltdown for Raven if she even attempted anything but withdrawal. The defenses were frighteningly tight, as complete as her own _at least_, and containing traps she could barely detect much less conceive the construction of. Of course, she was willing to bet anything that some of her own defenses would befuddle him as much as this, if not more, so she didn't let the look of things expand her uncertainties about her own defenses any further.

Rather than remove the thought then, she waited, her only hope of this working resting squarely on her defying the extreme danger she'd placed her mind in. After a long tense moment where she was _almost_ _positive_ she could feel the teeth of a mind trap closing in on her, the defenses relented, granting her full access. Though she could hardly believe it, he _had_ coded his defenses to recognize her, something she'd barely allowed herself to _dream_ of being possible. Those damn espers were _always_ prepared for these supposedly 'unforeseeable' circumstances.

Disaster Site

Raven opened her eyes, her mission complete, a well-wound connection to the control core of Skye's mind now linking her to him. Though she had no earthly idea of how to use the connection to control his body or most of his abilities, his ESP was a different story, and she tried to fire it up, activating it with a thought much as she'd power up her own. Abilities such as this usually worked all the time without one even thinking about it, but there was always the option of turning it on and off, and his had stopped working when he collapsed.

"AHHHH!" Raven gasped in a kind of nauseous pain the next instant, keeling over onto the ground as she was overcome by the change in her perceptions. Everything was distorted and twisted around her, the whole world going crazy as her mind was overloaded with sensory input. She could see everything, in every direction, in such spectacular detail that her brain actually began to disintegrate under the strain of interpreting it all.

"UUUHHH!" she moaned in pain once more as her mind was bombarded by knowledge of the motion of every dust mote, the crawl of every insect, the exact number of facets on every single piece of ruble, the rushing of blood through her body, and the structure of her bones and the constitution of her every organ down to the lowliest tissue, everything competing for mental capacity that could only focus on a single thing at a time. Though the crush of sensation was annihilating her mind, though she was so overcome by the power that she couldn't even differentiate the sensation of her spasmodic fit on the ground from everything else, some instinct she didn't recognize as her own pierced through it all to elicit exactly the response that would save her.

"_Filter filter filter_," she chanted quickly, as though the words were an anchor she would throw down to pull herself from the mind disintegrating seizure she'd so suddenly broken into. Almost the moment she'd gotten the short mantra out, the cacophony was silenced, and she ceased her spasms with a sigh of relief. After luxuriating momentarily in the new quiet within her mind, she pulled herself to her knees and edged over to sit on a fallen slab of stone. This was how Beast Boy and Cyborg found her when they returned to the medical area the next moment.

"Raven, are you okay?" asked Beast Boy, his normally obnoxious tone colored by genuine concern as they walked in on her sitting with her face nearly between her knees, so far was she bent over. She didn't answer at first, so he signaled to the bigger guy, whose face was also twisted in concern and surprise, and the two of them together helped her carefully to her feet. They were extremely delicate, as it never paid to touch Raven without either her explicit consent or a dire emergency.

"Come on Raven, talk to us girl. What happened?" asked Cyborg, as he helped Beast Boy sit her on a free gurney next to Skye's. There was again no response, and he was just about to suggest they go get a doctor or something when a sudden flash of activity from her canceled all his other thoughts.

"_Hands off_," she spoke darkly from where she sat, and the two young men practically leapt away from her in their effort to obey. "I appreciate the concern," she continued to speak in her dark monotone, "but I'm fine. I was tapping into Skye's ESP so we could use it to find survivors. I didn't realize exactly the extent of his power, and so it took a little getting used to." Her tone told them that was pretty well all they'd get out of her, but Beast Boy's sudden curiosity got the better of his survival instincts.

"Wait, so you've got Skye's ESP now? _Does it work_?" and he was overcome by fantasies of what he'd do with power like that. Girl's locker room ranked quite prominently on the list, just as an example, and he quickly lost interest Raven's answer as he was absorbed in wonderful daydreams.

Raven, before she responded, lifted her head and looked down at her hands, her face suddenly lighting with amazement, as though she'd never seen them before. She actually seemed to forget about the guys then, looking over her body like her same old uniform was something all new and deeply engrossing. Cyborg looked on in confusion as Beast Boy began to drool through his fantasy and Raven started to stare around the room like someone on their first LSD high.

Raven, for her part, couldn't really be blamed for her distraction. It's not every day someone opens their eyes to look at the world with penetrating clairvoyant vision, and that she was taking it for a test drive was only expected. Words can't describe how much more defined and vibrant the world is when one is no longer limited by the electromagnetic spectrum, when everything, regardless of lighting, is bright, distinct, and completely encompassed within one's senses. That the outer boundaries of an object are no longer the limit of one's perception, that to look through something to its core, to understand the inner workings of any given thing, is only the slightest desire away, is an enormous change from the way vision normally works, and an incredibly neat one. Finally, when one's vision improves like that, certain other imperfections involved with using eyes vanish: depth perception, hand-sense coordination, everything increases to levels that those dependent on eyes couldn't ever imagine. In the end, you know longer _see_ where things are, you simply _know_ where they are.

She finished enjoying her new view to the world around the room, then turned her head to look at Beast Boy and Cyborg. At the sight of them, she started somewhat, then leaned forward to get a better look, more out of habit than any need for proximity. Her eyes were wider than the guys could remember having seen them recently, and for Beast Boy, it was only a small jump from his own thoughts to an explanation for her apparent shock.

"HEY!" he shrieked indignantly, hands rushing to protect his modesty as he sort of twisted to one side and scrunched up.

Raven's face darkened viciously, her abstract admiration of the male form taken entirely wrong by Beast Boy. She'd simply never seen a view to the masculine musculature like that, Skye's ESP being better than DaVinci sketches as far as perceiving the purity of human form (even though neither specimen was exactly magnificent).

"Don't flatter yourself," she muttered in exasperation, and she felt a slight sting as she remembered saying that to Skye, "I was admiring Cyborg's construction. I'd never seen it from the inside before." A white lie, meant to assuage B.B. and discourage teasing.

"You can see inside me?" Cyborg wondered aloud, then registered the compliment. "Yeah well, hey, I don't blame you for being impressed, I am one incredible hunk of hardware—every system absolutely cutting edge!" and he began to preen slightly as he was reminded of how impressive his own technology was. Beast Boy looked to Cyborg's relaxed state, his embarrassment forgotten with his jealousy for Raven's rare compliments, and he began to bicker with the bigger man almost right away. Raven almost chuckled as she admired the effect stroking the ego could have on the immature and irresponsible.

"So why exactly aren't you two off digging for survivors?" she asked, not quite accusatorily, shaking them from the childish fight they'd broken into. The two looked sheepish for a moment, then Cyborg caught himself and started the explanation.

"My scanners are being jammed by something, I don't know what. It's like whatever was in that building that fell, it was protected by some kind of crazy advanced electronic countermeasures to prevent prying electronic eyes from seein' in. I came over to get the T-car and see if I could boost the signal, but it ain't lookin' too good." His reason explained, Raven turned her new senses on Beast Boy's face, trying to see if she could control how deep the clairvoyance penetrated and having little luck. He actually grew nervous under her stare as he stammered his response, the look she gave him while she tried to keep the perception on his skin rather than his brain matter apparently quite disturbing.

"Ah heh… Robin sent me! He wanted to know if you're ready. It looks like you are so…"

"I am, and I think it's about time I show you all how saving lives was meant to be done." Though it was phrased as a brag, she said it like a hopeful promise, then floated up and began to fly over the wreckage toward the spire of stone. She got about ten feet before she stopped dead in the air.

The moment she'd gotten a little ways off, the perception had begun to grow fuzzy, the world going out of focus faster than an ineptly wielded camera. She immediately returned to the ground, the world snapping back to crystal clarity, and the look of pure rancor on her face keeping the curious duo quiet. It took her a long moment of thought before it occurred to her what had gone wrong, at which point she snapped in satisfaction, the selfsame gesture hefting Skye's body into the air on a sheet of black.

"Where're you goin with him? Isn't he still hurt?" asked Cyborg after her, but she merely continued to fly off. This time the world remained distinct, and she chewed herself out for not realizing how short-range his power was sooner. She was tapping the effect, but it was still generated by his brain, she couldn't carry it around with her like he would if he astral projected or something. This is what she thought of as she reached a point next to the still-smoking spire of rock and set down, Skye's body floating upright just behind her, and two things suddenly occurred to her. First, it would take forever to find everyone by using active clairvoyance (even now she could see only about twenty feet beneath her), and second, her using his powers here in the real world might screw with his spirit's ability to use them on the astral plane, if that was really where he was (not that she _really_ cared if it bothered him).

In a flash of inspiration, once again that she couldn't particularly attribute to herself, she opened her spiritual senses to the world instead, trying to feel the space around her through the miasma of misery, pain, and Terra's residual power. What had felt to her like a meaningless mosh of departing souls, human suffering, and the earthy energy their wayward ally had saturated the area with was suddenly blown into whole new proportions.

The filter already in place, Raven was still staggered by the enormous amount of information flooding into her mind. It suddenly became extremely difficult to shield out the terrible misery and pain of the dead souls currently migrating in such massive force, her empathetic powers drawing the disembodied ghosts like a beacon. She muttered a ward she'd learned to chase away such creatures, their all-consuming hunger for more life forcing them to seek out mediums like herself. They generally dissipated to the afterlife or whatever after a few days, but in the meantime they were like landmines of misery to sensitives, sucking and clinging to mind shields like ethereal lampreys.

As the magic chased away the ghosts, she was struck by further inspiration, and drew Skye in until he was only inches behind her. Activating his mind shields and overlapping them with hers, she was finally able to appreciate the rest of the landscape without the glare of clinging feelings. On a side note, she began to sweat lightly under the strain of using her powers and his at the same time.

In any case, Skye's aura vision was something else entirely. The dead landscape of smoking rocks and metal was black as night, illuminated only by the waves of despondent emotion and sensation still wafting over them from the dead souls, which glowed like misty blobs of multicolored torch fire from the safe distance they were keeping from her ward. Everything containing the faintest spark of life in any reasonable proximity to her lit up like a lighthouse to her senses, standing out from the dull and often unintelligible background, even from behind walls and barriers.

Allowing herself a mild thrill of victory, she turned the senses downward, immediately spotting dozens of spirits in various states of disrepair. Here and there was the dull flickering of the suffocating brain, one winking out and floating upward as ghost only to flee away from her protections. Faded and distorted spirits abounded as those whose bodies had been broken by the rock fall awaited death in blissful unconsciousness. Everywhere, however, were the shells, voids in the background spirit noise that marked a corpse, dead as dead can be, and Raven staved off tears as she tried to ignore the automatic tallying going on in the back of her mind (a.k.a. Skye's vacant brain, right now). The slight sadness she couldn't block was replaced with determination after a moment, as the ones that still had a hope of living began to stand out among the already lost.

Wasting no more time, Raven spoke her mantra softly, pointing her hand toward the still-rising medical facility and wrapping dozens of hand stretchers and gurneys in her spirit, then dragging them into the air. As the fleet of platforms closed in on her, a set of brightly living spirits advanced from her side. Only one ventured to disturb her concentration with conversation, that, unfortunately, being the only one she couldn't get really angry at, and she announced her curiosity with a sudden gasp.

"Raven! Why do you carry friend Skye at your back like a murdwurp with her young? Oh! Is it one of your 'magic rituals'?" and the woman flew closer with a spectacularly sweet tone of interest in her words.

Raven nearly lost her composure as she recognized this reference, barely keeping a trailing gurney from clipping a rescue worker on the head. Starfire's perfectly innocent question routed from a disgustingly embarrassing incident Raven had suffered with the naive one, an incident involving a racy little book that had somehow found its way into a box of random titles she gotten cheap from her favorite bookstore's clearance sale. She'd left the box outside her door for five minutes clear shelf space, and when she'd gotten back, Starfire had mystically discovered the embarrassing title and begun practicing her increasingly accurate English skills on a passage where the characters were, shall we say, "getting friendly." Her hastily snapped answer to Starfire's "inquiry as to why a man and a woman would be in that position?" had been "_Magic_ _Rituals!_" then a quick snatch for the offending paperback and a hasty retreat back to her room. She'd left the confused alien in a swirl of dust, slamming the door shut just in time to block out the floor-cracking explosion that rocked her room, flipping furniture and overturning pedestals. The book had felt the fury of her emotions next, disintegrating to dust under the force of her embarrassment. Oh the number of times Starfire had almost started talking about that again…

Her heart had just slowed back down to a regular pace as she set the medical platforms down on in neat rows before her, when a sudden impulse caused her to stop merely perceiving the location of her friends and really _sense_ them. She couldn't place the feeling that made her turn, but she later decided it must have been subconscious longing, for when she actually concentrated on the brilliant spirits of her two friends, her heart nearly leapt into her throat and it was all she could do not to melt the nearby rocks to slag.

Starfire… Starfire was gorgeous! The interlocking orange and green radiance of her soul was like looking into a pool of purity incarnate, emanations of joy and love garnering a vision of glorious beauty like none Raven had ever been visited by before. Even though it was completely outside of her tastes in artistic style, mood, and color scheme, she still fought to keep the uplifting happiness blossoming in her heart off of her face as her soul resonated in sympathy with the loveliness before her. She had to tear her senses from the woman before she began to cry at the sight.

When her senses pried loose from Starfire, they landed squarely on Robin, and the wash of royal blue across her mind was like a cool wind of hope. If Starfire embodied purity, Robin was an incarnation of nobility and strength, his soul a pinnacle of masculine energy. The part of Raven that was a woman, the part that had always noticed Robin's looks and personality, melted like butter on a hotplate, and it took every ounce of Raven's control not to go goo-goo eyed and blush as a completely guttural physical reaction was wrenched forth by this insight into his soul. As she killed the feeling like she would any other, she was washed with shame at the bottomless desire she'd felt, as though her friendship to Starfire meant nothing. Though the two were taking forever to get together, she would never dream of blemishing the relationship, her feelings for Robin an entirely controllable impulse compared to her complete trust with Starfire. She was recovering once more when a final realization struck her with just under hurricane force.

Deciding the safe place to concentrate her senses while she regained her composure was between the two radiant souls, that was where her focus landed, bringing Skye's powerful ESP to bear on the gossamer strand of spirit energy that connected the man and woman before her. She wondered briefly what the hell it was before that mysterious intuition struck again, telling her that the two were _connected_ in a very spiritual sense, infested with the kind of connection that would only grow with time. With this pair, it could only be love, and that they'd finally gotten together came as almost as much of a shock as it was the fulfillment of an expectation she'd held for months. A passing whim to taunt them with her insight was struck down like the folly it was, and Raven decided that she'd been around Beast Boy to much to even consider revealing their secret before the two decided they were ready to tell. It was right around here then that she realized they were talking to her.

"Raven, I asked if you need any help?" Robin prompted a second time, and she shook herself back into reality as the magnificence of their spirits became a controllable thing. She was forced to actually consider his question for a moment, because she still wasn't exactly sure how this was going to work. Finally, she used her powers to heft Skye from her back and over to Starfire, who caught him gracelessly by the arms with his legs trailing down to the ground.

"Take him off my back," Raven instructed her, even as she cringed at the blossom of intensity in the ambient spirit noise. Now that she had a better sense of how it worked, she toned down the sensitivity herself, leaving her with a much sharper idea of where everyone was. So, with the others waiting and stretchers lain out in rows, she got to work.

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos," she said calmly but powerfully, extending her hands out in front of herself as black power blossomed from her eyes and coated her body. A wind kicked up to answer the extreme ethereal displacement her spell was causing, and so her cloak blew back on her neck and set to flapping in the gale. The next moment, the power took shape.

A shadow raven of enormous size sprouted from Raven's body and took flight directly up into the air. Turing through a tight spin, in came back to the ground and plunged in, seeping between the stones and passing down to the trapped survivors below. Their spirits lit like glowing targets in the night to her new senses, it was simple to find their exactly location in time-space and pluck them from this physical reality. Like a black wind of hungry emptiness, the spirit construction swept through the rubble, drawing each survivor into itself before moving on to the next, quickly vacating the enormous disaster site of every living victim.

When she could no longer sense a single bright sprit beneath her for fifty feet in every direction, she brought the shadow bird of her soul's power back to the surface, its heavily loaded form as perfectly flat and billowing as ever. Sweeping over the rows of stretchers and gurneys, it deposited its payload, a single pass empting its total contents quickly and safely onto the surface. As she allowed the dimensional transference construct to die, Raven idly noted that there was exactly one stretcher or gurney for every single person she'd saved, a situation that she hadn't even attempted to plan out. How the fuck had she managed that?

"Raven… you did it!" shouted Starfire with glee, twirling Skye's limp form around like a big rag doll in her exuberance. She actually slung the rather big guy into her left arm so she could embrace Robin with her right, the shorter man gagging under the crushing force, even as he too congratulated Raven on her success. When he got away from his lady friend's celebratory squeeze, he staggered over to Raven where she'd collapsed and placed a hand on her shoulder.

"Great job Raven—I had no idea you could do that!" There was real admiration in his voice, and Raven wasn't in the mood for the pride and embarrassment this elicited in her.

"It was simple. I used Skye's power to find them, I used my power to bring them out. Tell the clearing crew that they'll have to dig the rest out themselves… I'm not touching my mind to any corpses tonight, not with senses like these." She spoke with calm conviction and a slight attitude, and Robin immediately realized that she was more tired that she would ever let on. He once again wondered what the hell had happened between his talk with Skye and his arrival here, but he knew that the last thing that would get him an answer would be pressing Raven why she was pretending not to be exhausted.

"Okay then, that means the immediate emergency here has passed. We need to get back to the tower and figure out what Slade's planning to do next. Starfire, put him down and go get the others, we've got things to…"

Raven stopped listening as another new sensation ran through her from her connection to Skye's powers, a mild surge of fear, anger, pain, and sadness striking her so suddenly that she yelped, drawing the surprised attention of the other Titans. The feeling persisted, and the next thing she knew there was more: directions, images, sounds, and knowledge. As she watched some scenes play through her mind, the fact that what she was seeing was a vision of the future penetrated her own amazement and shocked her into action.

"Robin, we've got problems," she said ominously from the ground as she vainly attempted to pull her fantastically tired body to her feet. "Fighting, death, Slade isn't done with them yet tonight. We have to try to…" and she was cut off by the effort it took her to come to her knee, Robin easing her back to the ground in concern even as he listened with dire interest to her prophecy.

"Raven, please, just sit down. What are you talking about? Where is Slade going to strike?"

"Skye's powers… detect violence as it creeps up in the future. Slade is going to war, some kind of fight with someone else. There will be two more battles soon, one of them is downtown, the other is by the park. I… I don't know how soon, but—"

"Right! Okay, let's go. Starfire?" and his question was answered with a nod as the fair alien took off toward where Beast Boy and Cyborg were already waiting.

"Hey! What about me?" asked Raven indignantly, even as she still struggled hopelessly to stand.

"You're not going anywhere Raven, not in your condition," Robin called back over his shoulder, "just stay here and keep Skye company!" Raven was livid at being left behind, even as she knew she wouldn't be using any more destructive power tonight. She was simply too drained after all the shit she'd been through, and yet there was more to do. Reaching out with a mental contact then, she telepathed a last message into Robin's mind.

"_Robin, if you're going to fight Slade, you'll have to tell the others about _her_ before hand_," she reminded him forcefully, then camped out in his head till she got a sense that he agreed. "_She's not the woman we knew right now, she can't be reasoned with or appealed to, so don't bother. We _can't_ let him keep her Robin, we can't fail her again._" This last was said with a solemn sadness that he could probably feel through their connection it was so pronounced, and she in turn felt his answering sadness and frustration. It was a damned sad situation.

That final warning granted to her leader, Raven pulled herself along the ground toward Skye's prone form. As she arrived next to him, she sensed the rescue workers approaching and beginning to rush the people she'd just saved off to receive medical attention, and was thus not surprised when one dust-covered firefighter approached and asked if she needed a lift back to the tower or something.

"No, we'll be fine here," she responded, then recognized once more the extent of her own fatigue and amended her answer. "If, however, I could get a blanket and a free gurney over in the medical camp, I would be extremely appreciative."

"Miss" answered the rescue worker with a smile, "you just saved more lives in five minutes than we normally manage in half a year of explosions, fires, and super-battle damage. I think you've earned a bed and a blanket. Oh, and is your friend going to be—"

"He'll be fine. I think I can see to that myself," she cut him off, then smiled to herself in exhaustion as she considered the long road ahead, the weight of impending deaths still pressing down on her through Skye's ESP.

Downtown (Slade)

As he moved methodically through the back of the nondescript van he'd had Terra land by, Slade continually obtained and equipped the deadly tools of his trade. Lining the sides of his chest then were six pistols: two 9mm custom automatics, two small-focus needle lasers, and two wide beam phasers, extra ammunition and power cells strapped along his back and down his thighs. At either hip was a Colt .45 Single Action Army (think 'six shooters'), loaded with his own very special custom bullets, a bandolier of which was belted around his waist. As he finished attaching explosives to his belt and vest, he picked up the _coup de grace_, an enormous rifle with a chain of oddly enormous canister-like rounds trailing out of it. The rifle was at least six feet long, its blunt nose proceeding uniformly to the contoured grip and shoulder brace, the intricate tracings of circuitry and energy pathways down the side the only accoutrement. He wrapped the ammunition belt around the feeding mechanism then slung the whole big thing onto his back, a good two feet sticking up over his shoulder.

"Ah but that alien gun-runner was a most provident investment," Slade said to himself as he admired the last item he'd bought off the creature. The disruptor rifle had been a magnificent addition to his arsenal, his old high-velocity solid slug cannon frankly deficient as far as pure destructive power went. Now that he was back to nearly square one as far as his man and robot power went, he was going to have to do most of the work himself, just like in the old days. What fun.

"Here, take this," he ordered Terra out of hand, passing her an extra phaser pistol. The characteristic blunt nose of all beam weapons was present, and the whole weapon was so large that it barely fit in her hands. None the less, she took it without complaint and handled it with the grace he'd ingrained into her. "If your powers won't cut it, I want you to shoot to kill," he commanded again, and she took the order with a silence he knew could be naught but compliance.

"Hmf," he grunted, simultaneously pleased at her compliance and slightly disappointed that there was none of his own pre-combat high in the girl. He supposed it was a sacrifice he'd had to make, giving up the chance at having another who reveled in destruction for a tool he could actually rely on, but any desire he'd ever had to make more than a tool of the child were disappointed now. He knew the empty shell could never be his successor, and the thought brought him back to the question of _how_ exactly he would continue his legacy.

"Begin the diversionary strike," he said into a wrist communicator, and elsewhere a small army of robotic soldiers sprung to life, ready to assault a major base he'd identified at his old park-based drug distribution networks. The pier amusement park was a spectacular front, even the Titans missed his operation there while attending all the insipid distractions the front company provided, not to mention the way customers could flock unnoticed in the crowds while they obtained their fix of preference. He knew that to be a place where they'd concentrated their forces, and so that was where the obvious attack should fall. Of course, not only had he found their primary base, but their secondary as well, and that was the building around the corner and down the street.

As he waited, his surveillance equipment picked up a large force of people filing discreetly out the front door, a similarly blank look about them pegging them as mind slaves. His other surveillance camera was suddenly jammed, and he knew a force of robots was leaving by way of the roof access. Leaning back out of the van, he could just detect the sound of antigrav generators humming overhead as airborne units moved to counter his feint.

"Hook, line, and sinker," he said to himself as he stepped out onto the pavement and made final adjustments on his equipment harness. Terra followed, a silent figure at his side, and they passed the slab she'd been transporting them on all night as Slade walked out to the corner around which the opposition's auxiliary fortress was waiting. The platform was specially built for maximum stability and aerodynamic performance, so he was loathe to ditch it even as he knew it was poor practice to hold onto vehicles used to escape the scene of a crime. In any case, he pulled a monocular from a pocket on his thy and leaned around the corner, gazing down the street and into the front area of the open windowed financial services building that fronted their operation.

"Terra, do you know why I refrained from using weaponry on the Titans, even when it looked like I would loose to them?" he asked the young woman rhetorically, still tickled beyond reason by her inability to respond to his taunts. He delayed his point as he caught sight of that woman, the leader of their operation, standing in the front hall of the building with an incredibly annoyed expression on her face. She wore some kind of bodysuit, not exactly amour but a far cry from regular clothing, and from her body language was currently engaged in berating two odd looking men.

"At first it was because I needed them to become stronger, needed Robin to become stronger so he would be ripe for inducting into my service. After that fell through, it was because I wanted them to suffer for their impudence, and a quick victory would have been far too easy. It would have been child's play to assassinate them one by one, stalk and murder them each in turn by taking advantage of their individual weaknesses. Very little in the way of super powers, after all, can withstand the skull exploding into a red cloud after a high velocity bullet impacts with it. Such would not have been an end befitting their talents, it would have been cowardly, and not a true victory at all. I may be what this world calls evil, I may have nothing in my soul to stop me from doing whatever it is I desire, but I did not become the man I am today by taking the cowardly victory over worthy opponents. I gave them a handicap, used subtle and diabolical tactics to torture their minds as well as their bodies, and in the end, they were everything I could have hoped, defeating me at the height of my power. Well, the gloves have come off Terra, they've been promoted to a threat deserving my every talent and attention, and as soon as we've taken care of these outsiders, the Titans will be next. May whatever gods they worship have mercy on their souls."

His monologue complete, he stood back from the corner again, putting away his monocular and crossing his arms before his chest. He'd wait for the explosions to signal the beginning of the conflict at the pier, and then the com-jammer would go up. After that, it would be only him and his tool against whatever was left in that base and their leader. Ah… sweet anticipation.

Preview: MWUAHAHAHAHA! …Oh, excuse the evil laugh, but the time has come for Slade to get his bad on in a big way. He and Terra are going to kick some ass, maybe, and the Titans are going to have a front row seat to the show, definitely. As to who'll be on top when the dust settles, the blood coagulates, and the burns start to pulsate with agony… well… you'll just have to wait and see. Hey, and can you say, "visiting hours at Skye's astral beacon"? I knew you could.


	17. GW3:The Night is Always Darkest

Gang Wars III: The Night Is Always Darkest…

Intro: I know, I know, this one was a long time in coming. I'm just going to say that the end of the term and the holiday conspired to make writing a little harder than usual and leave it at that. In any case, get ready for a rock-em sock-em action bonanza. This chapter is a thrill: action, romance, violence, drama, bloodspray…. and a cat? Read on!

Oscillogenerator Secret Construction Site

"What do you mean, '_setbacks'_?" snapped White into the telescreen, Green's fair featured face cringing at the emphasis in his words.

"I'm saying that we have a rival for control of the city's underground operations. I heard he was dead when I took his businesses away, but apparently I was misinformed. His first strike took out my base of operations, buried drone factory one, and kicked the city's law enforcement into a fit that's not likely to quiet down soon."

"Green," and White's voice was carefully neutral and cold now, "When you told me you could bring this city under our control, I believed you. I believed that you wouldn't let me down, that I could count on you to maintain discreet flow of materials and build up our forces for when the generator is complete. I loaned you my mind slaves, my kill-bot designs, I placed my trust in you. Now you're telling me that your _incompetence_ has cost us our _anonymity_, our _main weapons factory_, and the _keystone resource pipeline to the mother base?!?!_" His tone was a cold scream, emotionless and manically passionate at the same time, the voice of his madness.

"I didn't say—" Green began to protest his accusations, not even slightly intimidated by his unhinged screams.

"I _don't care_ what you have to _say_! I want _action_! You will not _call_, you will not _show your face_, and you will not _drag your bleeding carcass_ ANYWHERE near this base until you have reestablished control of the situation! Do you understand me?"

"Fine," and her voice was a warm indignation to his cold fury, "but I'll need men and materials. This Slade character has resources I can't track or disable yet, and the primary drone fleet was destroyed in my headquarters."

"Blue and Red are yours to command. If it takes more than the three of you and the second drone fleet to destroy this impudent little man, I'll be forced to take action _personally_. Green, _you don't want that to happen_."

"I understand. I'll call you when Slade is dead." With that final promise, the signal went blank, and White was left to contemplate how the changing situation would affect the progression of his timetables.

Green had been so far in advance of her quotas that they practically had enough supplies to complete the construction already, so that was truly of little concern. Getting enough laborers could be a problem, but there were other pipelines he could have Red run them through, and with the monetary end so very well covered already, he could even put Green onto that angle as well, cutting off her insipid plots by separating her from the independent power base she'd been building so very clandestinely. In the end, it would actually be kind of nice if this Slade fellow managed to off her somehow, and it occurred to him that he might have to arrange for such a thing to happen, or appear to happen, should the conflict last long enough. The others had too much respect for Green for him to allow her to continue living. As for the final special ingredients… he could get those himself, as he'd planned all along, and then there would be nothing between him and multi-universal domination. As he began to bask in the images of victory that danced though his mind, he was struck by a mild curiosity, and ordered his computer to bring up an image of the destroyed headquarters building.

When he looked at the way the stone spire had gutted the structure, he was actually mildly impressed, the elegant comprehensiveness of the massacre charming to say the least. He was just wondering how the man had managed to cause the seismic upheaval when a strange flash of white from the rubble below the spire caught his eye, and suddenly his heart froze in his chest as he gagged on his own tongue.

"_Computer_!" he snapped, when he could breathe again, "enhance image at quadrant twenty seven!"

The AI obeyed promptly, and the screen zoomed in on the almost imperceptible white splotch nestled between the stones. It was a face, a face that White despised, feared, respected, and was nauseated by all at once.

"HIM—HOW—WHY!" he demanded rather than asked from the universe, "What is _HE_ doing here? Of all the people, the _only one that can interfere with my plans is here_! He's supposed to be _dead_! He's supposed to be _chasing false leads across the cosmos_! WHY IS HE HERE!" White was left to gasp for air after his shouting, his icy composure shattered by _that_ _face_.

Then, almost as suddenly as he had been thrown into a panic, his wild emotion changed to exuberance, even happiness, his whole body lighting with some inner amusement. A grin stretched from one end of his face to the other as he noticed the particularly _limp_ set of _that face_. He pressed a button on his desk and was placed instantly in contact with Yellow.

"Break out some of the prototype kill-bots, I have a priority target for them," he said without preamble to the gurgling pool of lemon colored slime on the other end of the line. The bowl of scum jiggled slightly as the web of nerves it contained processed some thought or another, then a bubbling slur of a voice answered as the robotic limbs attached to the jar continued to perform some nondescript task in the background.

"Ig will be no problem Whige. Whag is geir gargef?"

"The target is this young Terran," and White transferred the enhanced image to Yellow's screen with a quick gesture.

"Bug… ghaf loogs jusg lige—"

"I know who it looks like Yellow. Now stop torturing me with that speech impediment (White could never understand why the engineer didn't just fix his translator) and get moving. If this Terran boy isn't dead within fifteen minutes, I will _personally_ cook that _wiggling__sack_ you call a brain in its own _nauseating_ _juices_!" White hung up the connection with an emphatic gesture, then took his seat, gazing fixedly at the still image on his monitor. It was only a matter of time before his oldest and most hated nemesis was truly a thing of the past.

City Crossroads

The roaring of engines announced the coming of the Titans before anything else. When a supercharged hotrod of cutting-edge construction and an armored motorcycle designed for high-speed combat come charging down the road at breakneck speed, it's the kind of thing one is able to hear quite distinctly. Thus, when said vehicles come blasting through the streets, traffic parting like the Red Sea before upraised arms, only the deaf are caught unawares.

Robin was out-riding up front, his bike's headlight casting a lonely glare out into the streets as he urged the few cars still out over the side of the road so Cyborg could get by. The general state of emergency the Mayor had declared after the building collapsed had motivated most people into their homes or whatever cover they could find, but there was still the residual traffic of people hurrying to a safe place. Just above him, always sticking nearby as he wove all over the place, was Starfire, her hair streaming behind her as she kept pace easily with the machine's raging engine.

Starfire was caught by surprise then when Robin suddenly cut the acceleration and began to break steadily, the falling RPM rate sounding like the death throws of a powerful beast. She actually over flew him by quite a bit when he skidded the bike sideways to complete his stop, bringing the vehicle to rest in an abandoned crossroad of the shopping district. She turned and flew back, landing next to him just in time for Cyborg to roll up in the T-Car, his own brakes screeching wildly as he struggled to match the unexpected position Robin had taken up. He rolled down his window and stuck a very irate looking head out just in time for Robin to finish pulling off his helmet.

"Hey man, what're you _doin_? I thought you said this was urgent man?" he asked, annoyance in his voice at how close he'd come to scratching his ride in that last stop.

"It is urgent, but this is where we part ways. Cyborg, you and Beast Boy are going to head to the park at the pier. Starfire and I will head downtown." Robin offered no explanation for his orders, only their curt delivery with an unspoken understanding that they'd be followed without question. Cyborg looked simultaneously surprised at his answer and skeptical of the smaller man's plan.

"Hey, how come I get stuck with the furball and you get a pretty girl on your side?" Cyborg asked sarcastically, earning him a ringing punch of objection from B.B. that resonated on his chassis.

"Leader's prerogative," Robin answered smugly, a grin on his face, then slowly lost the humor in his countenance as something far more serious came to mind. "But listen guys, that's not important. There's something I've been meaning to tell you all."

"What is it Robin?" asked Starfire sweetly, after the enormous gravity of the issue began to bog down their leader's face abnormally. She felt a thrill of fear rising in her throat in expectation of news that could make him look like that, and the two guys now leaning out of the car mimicked the unsettled feeling.

"It's about Terra," he managed to begin, but choked up again as his face bunched up in a kind of pain. He looked as if what he was thinking about actually hurt him physically, and that, if nothing else, caused the others to begin to seriously panic.

"What _about_ Terra man?" asked Cyborg, the urgent fear-edged tone giving his words a kind of life. Beast Boy meanwhile was paralyzed by the heart-stopping implications of Robin's pain, his eyes widening in horror as a reality he'd known in his heart of hearts began to creep its terrible way into his forebrain.

"Slade tricked us guys," Robin finally squeezed out, and the rest followed quickly, as though to delay would make it impossible to tell, "not only did he get out of that volcano without a hitch, but Terra _didn't_ turn to stone. We've been hanging all over a statue, and _he's_ had her this whole time."

"Oh no…" muttered Cyborg, who was the only one capable of articulating a response. Beast Boy was in shock, his eyes bulging out of his head as his mind tried to encompass what it was being presented with. Starfire simply didn't understand what Robin was implying, knowing that news of Terra's health should be joyous, but at the same time realizing that there was more here than she knew, and the uncertainty kept her silent.

"It's worse than you think—worse than I could even imagine. Skye and Raven told me about it when they saw him, and her, just before the attack. You know what she was like at the end… she didn't want to have anything to do with him anymore. He… couldn't persuade her otherwise… and now he's had her mindwiped. Her memories are gone… and he's using her body and powers as a weapon. It's how he knocked over the building."

"This—this is _unacceptable_!" shouted Starfire fiercely, the first to regain her breath after the agony of the revelation had passed. "We must rescue her! She is our friend, no matter what else has happened, that is the truth!"

"_Slade! I'm going to…_" and Beast Boy trailed off, animal rage bleeding into his eyes as he clenched his fists and growled with primitive fury. Cyborg actually edged away from him in the car, the pure malice coming off him making the metal man break out in a cold sweat and actually feel a little sorry for Slade should the young guy catch up with him. If the hate Beast Boy had boiling in him right now was any indication, homicide would be a release from what the masked man would suffer.

"Listen guys, this isn't the time for revenge. When that time does come, we'll all make sure Slade gets his, but until then there are people who need saving, Terra not being the least of them." Robin was deadly serious now, they all were, and he simply embodied the solidity of their common resolve. Only Beast Boy retained the hate, his whole body hardening like steel as he was possessed by one thought that Robin had expressed.

"What does it matter?" he snapped bitterly, his face distorted by hate, "Slade erased her mind… she might as well be _dead_." B.B. spat the final word like the promise that would seal Slade's fate in his own mind.

"Calm down, there's still hope." Robin spoke out of hand, empathizing with Beast Boy's homicidal desires quite totally. He wouldn't mind seeing the color of Slade's insides either, only the utmost of restraint (and Slade's obnoxiously complete ability to defend himself) had held him back in the past. "Skye said that if we can recover her body, he can probably put her mind back together. He wouldn't make any promises, and heck, after he took whatever dive that put him under, I wouldn't expect it soon, but I've got a good feeling that all that stands between us and having our friend back is quick rescue and a little psychic hocus-pocus."

"_Damn it_, why didn't you say that sooner?!" Beast Boy demanded harshly, "Cyborg, get this crate in gear!"

"Watch what you call my baby man!" Cyborg snapped back at the hyperactive emotion-high little imp, but was met with a look so full of deadly determination that he quailed in the face of it.

Beast Boy actually grabbed him by the shoulder, yanked him down with animal strength, looked into his eye with a wild fury, and said simply, "_Drive_."

The T-Car probably broke acceleration records with the peel-out Cyborg pulled, swinging the tail around and blasting down the road that would take them to the peer. Robin and Starfire were left to cough in the cloud of incinerated tire and road-dust that was left in the boys' wake, then spent a moment recovering their composure. Robin was left with a free moment to take a good long look at Star, and he felt the sudden urge to make some kind of meaningful statement. This would be their first battle as an official couple.

"Starfire," he began uncertainly, "this fight coming up is going to be dangerous and—" but he was cut off by a hand on his shoulder. Apparently she knew exactly what he would say and exactly what he needed to hear.

"Robin, we have been through much together already. I need no assurances that you will protect me, no more than you need any that I will protect you. We shall… 'view each other's rears' like all great warrior-couples." Robin looked into her angelic smile and felt reassurance, something inside him now complete for her statement, despite the oddly suggestive mistake she'd made.

"Right Star, let's go. There's no telling how long we have before things go south," and he put on his helmet before Starfire could ask him why things would be traveling toward the equator, kicking his bike into gear and revving in the opposite direction from the one Cyborg had just burnt down. Starfire was after him in a shot, a flash of red and purple behind his red and green.

Downtown, an alleyway

Slade stood stock still in the shadows of the buildings around him, the blank Terra maintaining a similar quietude to his side. He measured a matter of moments before the battle at the pier went hot, and so he dropped his magnificently still posture to briefly loosen his arms and back. Stalking around the corner, he knelt on the side of the darkened street, the fronting of his target's base a good hundred meters down the road, facing him across from an intersection where the road came to a T.

"Tripod," he said without preamble, and a small motion from his emaciated blond shadow produced a trashcan-sized pillar of stone directly in front of him. Slinging the enormous rifle off his back, he lay the barrel on the pillar and began to get a feel for the weapon's balance and mechanisms. Though he'd listened closely to the weapons dealer's instructions on how the rifle functioned, he'd yet to actually discharge it himself, and thus he found himself suddenly having to go through the disgusting creature's oddly slurred lesson again as he set it up to fire.

The weapon, though enormously powerful, had been manufactured by a species that averaged nine feet tall, and thus it was completely unsuited to use by the 6'4" Slade. The thing that had sold it to him had customized the grip and triggering mechanism as well as fitted it with a special harness so it could be fired from the hip like a heavy machine gun, but in order to make use of the weapon's accuracy, the braced stance he now held was key. As he played his left hand over knobs and buttons along that side of the weapon, he gazed through the incredible sighting mechanism with his one good eye, watching the readout change. After fiddling with it for a while, he got the indicator to target the building's entire front for the initial blast, setting up his ambush exactly the way he wanted it. With a final button press, he locked the targeting data in the weapon's computer and freed the sight for alternate use. Without hesitation, he zoomed in on his opponents and began once more to spy on their activities.

As he gazed into the open glass front of the building, the woman and the two odd men were just returning to the foyer from somewhere in the back. They were flanked by the blank civilians, all of whom wore heavy overcoats he could tell held all kinds of unpleasant surprises for him. Of course, the least of his worries were a few cannon-fodder mind slaves, and he dismissed them immediately as he concentrated on the interesting ones. The woman was talking to the other two, and he began to read her lips as she spoke.

"…well that's what White said, so live with it. You two are under my command until we've gotten this under control, so don't get any ideas about heading out to go night-clubbing. We don't know what kind of resources this Slade has, so we can't afford to take any chances." The other two seemed to take the news as either annoying or disturbing, and it as the smaller man who answered.

"I don't care who this guy is, if it takes all three of us to get rid of him, I'll give the fucker an award. I mean, do you honestly expect me to believe that one of these primitive apes actually has what it takes to challenge us? Sure the bastard pulled off a nasty little ambush, but failing to kill us in it is liable to be the last mistake he ever makes! Just give me a whiff of his scent, a trail to follow, and a little room to work, and I'll have the pretentious meat-sack watching me chew on his intestines within an hour. I never, ever, let my food get the better of me."

The big guy added some small comment or other as well, but he was facing away, and Slade could only see that the others took the words for granted. Apparently this was a stupid one, getting no respect at all from the others, and then Slade recognized him from what little intelligence he had on the enormously odd rampage that had occurred just a few blocks from here. Someone that could cause all that certainly deserved respect of another kind, and the strategy he worked out to deal with the brute almost had him miss the woman making another comment.

"…and I'm telling you not to underestimate these Terrans. Something about this planet makes weird stuff happen to the things that live here, changes them in unexpected ways. Those crime fighters that got the best of Blue are a perfect example: only _one_ of them is of a higher species, all the rest are natives with peculiarly great ability. If you need any more evidence, take the fact that White is originally from this planet too, in a manner of speaking—"

The booming of an enormous explosion across the landscape announced the beginning of his diversion in earnest, the battle joined by two teams of lifeless, mindless, robots for no greater purpose than giving him less to deal with here. Though he would have _loved_ to look in on more of that fascinating conversation, he pressed a button on his belt activating the comm-jammer and brought back the firing solution the rifle's computer had worked out. The time had come to join the battle in earnest.

In a quick succession of movements, he targeted and fired upon the three areas the computer indicated, the gun silent but for the sound of it's ammunition feeding mechanism working. Firing it caused nary a whisper, just a huge kick in the chest from the recoil and the sudden destruction of the target. After the first shot, the whirring and clanking of the ammunition feed was drowned out by the obscene explosions rocking the front building's structure, the glowing red cracks of disruption energy working their way through the building like a bloody spider's web, minor explosions following the intricate tracings of red after a moment's delay. By the time he'd pulled the trigger for the third time, projecting out his silent and invisible destruction, the target of the first shot had already disintegrated into an ever-widening blossom of fire and falling glass, the entire front of the building soon melting into a heap of slag as flaming debris rained down onto the area his targets had been.

"Neat," was his immediate comment upon seeing the destruction his newest toy had wrought. It was followed by a mild disappointment that it had been so easy and so quiet, the weapon having no bark to speak of despite the impressive bite, not to mention the absurd kick he could still feel in his shoulder. In all, it was a highly amusing and effective way of getting the job done, the slight drop in efficiency from simply having Terra destroy the place more than made up by the pure enjoyment of blasting it himself and watching the burning wreckage fall onto the streets and all the people below. Despite the warnings that had been sounding since he last made his presence felt, there were still plenty of people around, most likely mind slaves, to stare in stupefied terror as they saw death advance on them in a burning rush of hot stone, metal, and glass. Such was the stuff nightmares were made of, and he loved it.

Suddenly, the flames began to die out seemingly of their own accord, sputtering into silence like the maw of hell had just taken a deep breath and held it. The suddenly quiet and intensely hot pavement was littered with scorched corpses, but Slade looked past them all to examine three figures sanding alone and perfectly fine in the smoking ruin. He had a hunch, but looked down his site once more to try and target them with the disrupter rifle anyway. Sure enough, the weapon's sensors read all three as wearing disruption shields, as well as active-type mind shields and electromagnetic distortion fields, so he stood from his firing position and began to stretch idly once more. He handed the cumbersome rifle to his diminutive second, and she just barely managed to shoulder the firearm onto some suddenly growing stone pillars before the weight of it crushed her. You could almost hear the western-style showdown music whistling in the background as he stalked down the road toward his opponents, the ever-silent shadow of the earthmover just behind him.

A Ways Down the Left Side of the T-Intersection

When the explosions at the pier registered on his birdcycle's computer readout, Robin mouthed a silent prayer that the other two would be okay even as he cast a quick glance over his shoulder to see lights flashing in the cloudless black horizon of the night. Revving his engine harshly, he leapt his bike forward the next moment, kicking into a wheelie as the acceleration picked up in response to his renewed agitation. Suddenly, another flash of light blossomed from the buildings directly ahead of him, and he was forced to kill his acceleration in a hasty spin out, flipping into a full 360 as friction refused to cooperate, then actually leaping from the bike just instants before it went totally out of control and barrel rolled a dozen times tail over nose into an abandoned storefront, just a few feet away from where the new blast had already begun to rain fire down onto the street. As Robin rose into the air, the world seemed to slow down, time dilating with adrenaline's blessed assistance.

Robin braced himself in panic as he prepared to take the ground's harsh embrace as his penalty for such an impetuous move, his whole body going numb in anticipation of the sudden shock of impact and the subsequent flesh-stripping roll into the firestorm he had so abruptly encountered. Though he moved to try it, there was no time for a grappling hook, nor any convenient lampposts to deaden his inertia, only the uncompromising asphalt and his hope that his armor would hold out. His ballistic arc after the leap was long and low, the motorcycle leaping ahead to encounter the building almost a whole second before he saw the ground coming up to meet him.

To his credit, Robin stared into the face of his opponent the ground until the last instant, where prudence told him it would be best to close his eyes and attempt to save them from the coming impact, and thus it was with a cringe that he met his salvation. A sudden jerk at his back and waist was the instantaneous prelude to the shock of his body's inertia hitting his costume with all the force his now-totaled ride had given it, knocking the wind from his lungs and giving him a blow to the gut not unlike a mule's kick. The sudden jerk sent his head flying forward with a snap even as the intense gut-busting knocked his eyes open and sent them bulging near out of his head, giving him a perfect view of the asphalt a mere few centimeters from the tip of his nose. The next moment he landed on the ground with a feather's touch, his burning torso sending him into a fit of coughs as he tried to pull air back into his lungs and dispel the inferno of pain in his stomach. When time returned to normal, the distorted ringing in his ears became something far more desirable.

"Robin! Are you okay?" asked that angelic voice as he lay prone on the ground, his dream girl standing over him while he struggled to pull breath back to his body. Though he wanted nothing more than to assure her, he was forced to wait until he'd gotten back enough air to talk.

"I'm—" he choked out before one huge gasp, "okay Star—" he finished, before wheezing protractedly, his lugs finally beginning to work again as he shook the whiplash-induced disorientation from his head and got his feet back under him. She helped him to stand as he brought his gaze up to the inferno before him, the five feet of clearance he had from it not nearly enough as the flames licked and nibbled at the burning rubble that even now fell from the building's face.

"This must be the other place Slade was supposed to attack… but why the hell is doing all this? This is the corporate office district—there isn't anything here to steal, nothing of value at all. Pencil pushers and number crunches don't even work this late, so it's not like there was even anyone to kill in there. Why would Slade attack empty buildings? For that matter, where is he? This looks like the work of plastic explosives, but enough to do this would have shown up on the scanners, so he must have caused this some other way, maybe from nearby."

Robin continued to wonder out loud as he tried his best to look through the fire. Starfire held him up silently as she too examined the flames, content to just be near him as his mind crunched through the enigma of this apparently meaningless attack. Her heart had almost stopped when he'd lost control of the bike, and her grip on him now was more to assure her that he was still alive than to support his quickly recovering balance.

It came as a shock then when the flames, so unreasoning in their fury, died an instantaneous death, as though a great snuffer had fallen over the area and quenched the raging like the most ephemeral spark. Robin's ramblings died mind sentence as silence fell over the scene of devastation, his eyes glazing over as he tried to comprehend what had caused so many macrojules of heat and light energy to vanish from existence. It was Starfire that noticed the three, and her actions probably saved their asses.

With a jerk, Robin felt himself flying through the air once more, a tight grip on his arm flinging him around until his back impacted abruptly with a brick wall, a sudden petite hand over his mouth quelling his involuntary gurgle of protest. He clued in to what had happened and looked over to see Starfire leaning over to peek around the corner of the alley she'd flown them into, her hand coming off of his mouth without any signal from him. Again without comment, she floated slowly higher on the alleyway corner, giving him room to scoot down and take a peek of his own. He resisted the completely natural urge to look up her skirt forced on him by his inherent maleness and poked his spiky-haired head around the corner.

What he saw in the light of glowing-hot stones and a miraculously functional street lamp was more than enough to squeeze a silent prayer of thanks for Starfire's instincts out of his strictly pragmatic soul. Striding through the rubble was a tableu of pure danger that chilled his heart, the huge man from two days past joined by a pair of others that literally dripped with homicidal intent and capability. His own crime fighter's instincts were screaming that these people were beyond dangerous, beyond _deadly_, the kind of people you didn't play around with. Hell, these three were the kind you didn't even wiggle some handcuffs at without an army at your back.

His quail of cold fear passed quickly, replaced by a cool confidence in his own abilities and those of his teammates. They would not be taken by surprise again, and they would not loose… _ever_. It occurred to him then that they were all looking in the same direction with the blank look sociopathic murderers tended to favor. Of course then he knew where Slade must be, and he wasted no time attracting Starfire's attention with a quick tap on the side of her boot where it floated a few inches above his head.

With a quick gesture and a point upward, he was given a nod in reply, then grabbed by his offered arm and hefted at an incredibly silent and speedy rate up the building until he was set on its roof. He kept the grip on her arm and pulled her gently to the opposite side of the building, where its roof would look down onto the street that formed a T-intersection with the one he'd crashed on.

With a sudden jerk of panic, he stopped Starfire cold and looked over at her brightly illuminated eyes. By pointing at his own masked eyes and making a slicing gesture across his neck, he was rewarded with a barely visible blush as she extinguished the lamps that would have so utterly given away their position, then the two of them leaned forward together to look down into the dimly lit disaster site below.

Robin's body convulsed in anger and disgust as the familiar profile came into view, Starfire looking at him with a slight fear as the tension began to flow off of him in waves. He saw that guy, the one that had haunted his nightmares and tortured his memories, and he could barely contain the fury that filled him. For a brief moment, it was as though no time at all had passed since that one night, and he still stood in helpless livid rage as he donned that scumbag's accursed armor in exchange for his friend's lives. Now, he had outdone even that on Robin's "Top 100 reasons why he shouldn't live to see trial," the almost invisibly slight figure at Slade's side the only proof he needed to substantiate Raven and Skye's stories. He'd done unspeakable things to a person he'd once sworn himself to support, and for this he'd _never_ forgive Slade _or _himself. Starfire noticed her the next moment.

"Terra!" she whispered harshly, fighting the urge to light up the night sky with the force of her own anger, "Robin, we must rescue her immediately!"

Robin answered her with a harsh look and a finger across his lips to signal silence from her. She balked in anger at his seeming hesitation, then realized the utter rigidity in his body, reading the tale it told of how very much self control it took Robin to keep from leaping down their right this instant himself. She quelled her own anger with an effort, realizing that she needed to honor his self-restraint by conforming to his orders. Without another word then he pulled out his communicator and flipped it open, trying to get the others over here as quickly as possible. If Slade and Terra were both here, the other attack must have been some kind of diversion, and he'd need help for no less than _five_ super villains at once.

When he got nothing but fuzz on his screen, he knew that Slade was once more, as ever, one step ahead of him, and he resisted the urge to smash the communicator on the ground in frustration. Instead, he placed the device once more in his belt and leaned down to see the two groups stop about twenty strides apart. Without a single word, he took something else from his belt, a kind of mini-satellite dish on a gun grip with wires coming out of it, sticking one of the wires into his ear even as he offered another to Starfire. She mimicked his action in wonder as she watched him point the gun down at their adversaries, then jumped slightly when voices filled her ear. It was their voices.

"Ah, if it isn't the infamous Mr. Slade?" asked an eerily cold female voice that Starfire matched by default the spectacularly attractive blond standing next to the brute that had clobbered her not even forty-eight hours ago. "If it isn't too much trouble, might I ask why you have such a penchant for blowing up my bases?"

"Well," and this was Slade's unmistakably frightening calculated drawl, "I just can't seem to get the hang of knocking on the door when I'm the one who owns the building." Starfire felt a shiver as she noticed the way he conveyed murderous threat without placing any inflection at all in his words.

"HA!" barked the woman, a vicious smile distorting her otherwise pristine features, "Boys, it looks like the little Terran is angry that I stole everything he owned in this world—except, it would seem, for the armor off his back and his little girlfriend." The other two chuckled sadistically, and the complete still that overtook Slade made Starfire take a second look at Robin next to her, the posture they assumed for barely restrained bloodlust being another of those nagging similarities between the two.

(Green)

Green, despite the mild singeing she'd gotten in the inferno before Red had quenched it, despite the boundless fury she felt at falling for this impudent being's second surprise attack in the same night, despite even the cold fear she felt for the wrath of White should this night go less than perfectly, was in her element. Never before had someone so completely taken her, twice in fact, and a very small part of her mind was still reeling with admiration for the pure guts it took to make such a bold series of strikes with the pathetic resources she estimated this Slade creature had at his disposal. The rest of her, however, was fairly purring with vitality, all other concerns forgotten as she matched wits with this magnificent new opponent, the spirit of competition consuming her soul as she gazed down at the being who even now attempted to intimidate her. Even as she traded meaningless banter and taunts with the Terran mastermind, she calculated her resources, accounting for everything that could conceivably contribute to the showdown Slade had forced here. When her mind had finished the analysis, she couldn't understand the one-eyed man's confidence.

In the final accounting, he simply must not comprehend the extent of the force ranged against him right now. His weaponry, though hardly embarrassing, was already well countered by their EDFs, military grade laser shields she'd broken out of Yellow's shipments. As for his archaic Terran firearms, she'd love to see those ricochet from the synthar-tritanium blend armor she now wore, no problem with that. The only thing standing between her and utter confidence in her total victory were the variety of expertly hidden close-combat devices he carried, and the unknown factor of the small Terran girl that stood so quietly by his side. She knew this man, in a sense, and knew he was not the type to underestimate, to strike without confidence in victory, so it was this girl upon who her main concerns fell. He would not bring a useless child to battle, and this city had a reputation for 'special' striplings. Despite his particularly unique circumstances, White alone was enough to teach her that young Terrans could still be deadly.

"…and his little girlfriend," she finished her most recent taunt, coming out of her deep contemplation with a more or less even estimate of her chances for victory, far less than what she preferred to be sure of. The utter still in his body told her that she'd managed to get to him with her little reminder of what she'd taken from him, and she lowered her estimation of him slightly before he made his comeback. It was as he spoke that she noticed the blank look on the girl-child's face, and a creeping fear began to work its way insidiously into her mind.

"Allow me to educate you offworld garbage on who exactly it is you're dealing with. I am Slade. No one steals from me, no one keeps me from getting what I want, and anyone who attempts either, suffers for their crimes. Take for example this sweet little thing to my side. Once she was a loyal vassal of mine, as much my partner in crime as those oafish cronies of yours, until the day she tried to betray me. Since then, she's had a colorful little three-month trip through a land of flesh-hooks and electrocution, nothing terribly out of the ordinary you understand, just a little unfettered enjoyment. When I'd finally exacted my fine for her betrayal from her flesh, I had her mind destroyed, piece by piece, until all that was left is the loyal killing tool you now see. Of course, _I liked her_, I will not be kind with any of you."

At his announcement, Green felt the fear that had been tickling along her nervous column coagulate, her body reacting under the human suit. Her stomata contracted violently and the water ran cold in her vascular tissue as she was confronted by the very things White had held over them all since the moment they no longer needed him to escape from The Can. There was no way Slade could know that White threatened them all with mind erasure, but none the less she felt the same root-twisting fear the other Terran tyrant in her life inspired. Of course, she hid it well.

"Slade, if you seek to impress me with your _terrible_ subjugation of a little girl-child, I fear you have grossly underestimated your opponents. As for this _awful_ _sting_ you feel at my 'appropriation' of your resources, well… I assure you that had I known you still drew breath, I would have killed you first and saved you the pain of humiliation at your defeat."

"Enough of this banter," he cut off the 'feeling out period' with a single phrase, still possessed of the same calculating tone as ever. "The time has come for me to remove you eyesores and get on with more pressing matters. Prepare to die."

Green heard Red and Blue prepare themselves on either side, and truthfully she was tempted to simply strike out with everything they had and kill these two quickly. However, she considered once more how very desperately she desired Slade all to herself, the consuming need to match her skill against his was actually threatening to overcome her composure. She made her decision quickly.

"Wait boys, just hold on a moment. I want the Terran male for myself, you two kill the child. Better yet—Slade, why do we even have to bring in our lackeys at all? Can't this just be between the two of us?" This was the turning point, she could feel it, feel the tension in the air as Slade's eye narrowed, his mind weighing her offer. He had to see it was his only hope, so she knew it would be her perfect chance to claim true victory over this primitive creature who'd so humiliated her.

She realized her mind was wandering just in time to notice something, an odd glowing of yellow from the girl-child's eyes, and her every instinct was set to action in that same instant. Of course, it was already too late.

"No," responded Slade stiffly, before the area exploded with action.

(Slade)

Exactly as he'd instructed her to, Terra spent the time he bought them with talk to select three small stones, one near the feet of each opponent. On his hand signal, carefully coinciding with his rejection of the woman's outlandish offer, she flung them like bullets into the shield generators each wore on their belts. The motion was quick and they were completely off their guards, so the three stones impacted with the three belt-mounted semi-spherical devices like marbles striking china, and the sound their simultaneous destruction was Slade's cue to draw.

As he threw himself into a full crouch, he yanked free a revolver in his left and a needle-laser in his right pulling them out to train on the two men simultaneously. Even as he began his flying leap from the spot they'd no doubt be eradicating mere instants from now, he already had two shots off, well aimed for the quickly reacting pair of henchmen. As his leap carried him away from the puddle of molten asphalt he'd been standing in and the wave of heat and expanding air caught up with him, he saw his laser hit the brute in the right eye, his bullet striking a red flare of light and lancing off to hit the smaller man's shoulder rather than his forehead. He had no more time for observation then, because the battle was joined in earnest.

He hit the ground in a roll while holstering his revolver, launching a grenade without looking to the spot they'd all be scattering from and moving instantly to a run as he pulled free a phaser and leapt once more. The grenade went off just in time for him to turn and get a glimpse of movement off to his right, so he rolled through his leap and planted his feet on a tall hunk of debris, lancing out with lasers as he traced the movement. He leapt again just in time for the boulder to split in two behind him, then he was firing again as a black blur dashed off on his right and a god-awful screaming filled the air.

In the next moment he was running again, off-handing another grenade to cover his back as he cleared himself from what had to be the woman and took an opportunity shot off to his left at the big one. He poured fire at the thing as it flailed around, seemingly blind, his lasers striking true and leaving vicious burns, but then there was an explosion behind him as his other bomb went off and another movement out the corner of his eye had him leaping into another roll. A flash of heat so vicious that the miss melted some of the armor on his hip whooshed by, and he knew that the small one, the pyrokinetic, had taken his shoulder-wound rather well.

He sprung out of the roll and was shooting again, tiny red lances leaping from his right hand as thick white globs of energy burst from his left, the tracers of incandescently incinerating air following the now red-glowing man as he leapt to the side. He couldn't be sure of a hit, but then he was coming back toward the ground and the purest of reflexes forced him to twitch his head to the side. A metallic 'ting' announced that something had scraped the side of his mask, so he went from his landing to a side kick that hit nothing but air and sprung away into a back flip while filling the area with hot light. His majestic firing maneuver left streamers of burnt air like the spokes of parallel tires, and he was rewarded with a hiss of pain as he finished his move by releasing the grenades he'd grabbed with the heels of his hands at the start of his flip in the general direction of his antagonist.

He turned to escape that blast radius just in time to see a pillar of rock leap diagonally out of the ground and strike the huge man in the chest, kicking him back like a golf ball before the swing and flinging him into the destroyed building, even as a wall suddenly rose out of the ground further to his left and intercepted a blast of heat that quickly melted it back down to slag. Terra was doing her part, and he took the moment to pop the power cells out of each gun and use the empty weapons to scrape two more off his back, reloading them each one-handed.

A movement of air at his side was just barely noticeable over some explosions, and he threw himself forward while swinging around and firing, sweeping a curtain of hot light through the area even as he saw the blur leap upward over his attack. He traced the indistinct form into the air, firing all the way, but saw his attacks begin to ricochet erratically as he got her in his sights, a spinning blade reflecting the shots in every direction imaginable. The next moment, she was crashing down and he barely got a hand up to stay his own execution.

A terrible jolt in his arm told him his gun barrel had intercepted the blow meant for his skull, and he twisted it precisely so the long, sword-like blade flashed over his shoulder and buried solidly in the rock he had landed on, splitting it in two down to the ground beneath it. As her weight hit his body and drove the breath from him in a massive blow to his abdomen, he dropped the useless butt of the gun her blade had cleaved clean though even as he twisted his other weapon to point at her head, an iron grip on his wrist fighting that off and making his first shot go wide, singing some blond hair and no more. His now free right hand came around to grip the blade hand as it twisted to the side, seeking to slit his throat, and this one he caught centimeters from completion. There they were then, stalemated.

"Well Terran," she said to him with a voice strained by her effort to bisect his jugular, "You've managed to impress me."

"That's a disappointment," muttered Slade back, his voice strained by an effort to paint her brains across the air, "I was attempting to _kill_ _you_!"

He took that moment to shift his grip on the laser pistol and whack her across the face with it, pursing the advantage until he'd rolled over on top of her and pressed her to the ground, his blaster only inches from a kill shot on her head. She caught up her grip admirably and held off his advantage, threatening with the sword again.

"Well then I suppose you'll understand when I do _this_!" she snapped back at him, and twisted his wrist hard enough to slip the gun from his grip while simultaneously flipping him up over her head, following through until she was once again over him, one hand on the sword's hilt and the other on the blade as she pressed it down at his neck. His own hand still held off her blade by gripping her wrist, while the one that had held the gun was now employed parrying her sword with his forearm guard. She grunted with effort, pressing down even harder, and his armor split along the blade's unbelievably sharp edge, drawing blood from his arm and a hiss of pain.

"You'll have to do better than that!" he snapped at her, managing bravado even as her blade drew closer to his throat. Then he actually backed it up, pressing forward with his bloodied arm and driving her away. She looked shocked that her sword didn't go through his arm like a knife through a fresh carrot, then realized his broken armor was pinching the blade.

"Very well Slade," she gasped, and he could sense her summoning strength from her deep reserves and gathering her balance, unable to counter her coming attack, "_You asked for it_," and there was a manic grin on her face as she struck.

Rising ever so slightly, she bucked in place, driving home her knee directly to his groin with the sound of steel hitting brass. She'd landed a deceptively powerful blow, so much that he felt it through the armor and his whole body seized in pain, the blade slipping in for his throat as he convulsed. He snapped it back to a stop, but she had him now, he was completely unable to press her away with his arms so far back. The next moment, the blade slid to the side somewhat, biting deeply into his arm and slicing through the mesh of his collar, drawing blood there in a tiny rivulet as he spasmed in his effort to press her back.

"You see, I can play dirty too, 'Mr. Ambush'," she said as her perfect face leaned in over his masked one, and he could tell by her voice that she thought she was free to claim his head, and victory, at any time. That was okay by him, because she'd finally lined up correctly.

"I play dirtier," he choked out past the blade pressing on his neck, then activated a pressure switch in the glove he held her wrist with. Before she could so much as twitch, much less twist away, the holsters for his two SAAs both turned upward and pointed at her guts, firing three times each with a deafening roar. His special ammo made the guns buck, bark, and flash like dynamos of heat and sound, and just like that the woman had six enormously gaping holes in her belly.

"B-but… my… body… armor," she whispered, then collapsed onto him. The wounds had erupted like geysers of green and pink muck, splattering a cloud of said fluids into the air and allowing a torrent of them to pour down onto Slade before he could throw off her limp sack of a body. She lay bleeding on the broken ground as he regained his feet, and by the time he was looking down at her she'd begun to… _laugh_?

"Hehahmhmhm," she managed to chuckle, then coughed hard and expelled a splash of her vital fluids. "You think… you think you've got me… but you don't" she struggled to brag through a mouth and throat full of the gooey muck. He cast her a darkly indifferent look as he drew the SAA that still had three bullets with the hand of his non-sliced left arm and pointed it at her head. She ignored him and touched a nondescript part of her belt. As he watched in mild amusement, her face lit with panic, whatever effect she'd hoped to initiate apparently not working, and then the panic turned to fury before his eye.

"_Traitor_!" she snapped, choking up another gout of fluid with the word. She seemed to squirm with the desire to scream and rant that she was too weak to fulfill, and now the fluid was dripping from her ears, nose, eyes, and a great mess of it was dripping down her completely coated chin. "How dare that—" her concentrated fury is interrupted by another gout of fluid, "f-f-_fuck_ deactivate my teleporter access?!"

The taint of internal strife Slade detected here intrigued him, so he held of on finalizing the woman. Perhaps he could learn something new from her yet. Just then a somewhat distant explosion altered him to the fact that Terra's task was not yet complete, and he took a quick glance at a readout on his injured arm as he discarded the ruined armor there and put a field dressing on his wound. Terra was a small distance down the road ahead of him, the burning wreckage and spreading fires giving him little visibility of the area. A sudden weight on his front brought his attention back to the woman, who was crawling up him and covering him with the disgusting crud that passed for blood in her.

"You've got—got t-t-t-to save me Slade," she begged for her life, disgusting him far more than any mere bodily fluid ever would.

"_Get off of me_!" he snapped, and punctuated the command by pistol-whipping her mercilessly to the ground; the sickening crack of the gun-butt hitting her skull like music to his ears. To his great surprise, she continued to mumble as she squirmed inhumanly in a puddle of the pink and green fluid, a blow meant to barely avoid killing her failing even to turn out her lights. He took his moment of mild admiration with grace, leaning down to pick up her discarded sword.

The blade had been moving too fast to see for most of the fight, but now that he looked at it he could be truly impressed. It was a one-edged slicing affair not unlike a katana, but it was sharpened to such a fine edge that he could scarcely imagine what a direct hit would have done to his body. The workmanship was so fine that he almost wished he'd spent more time on swords in his training, promising himself to look into that as the melodious sound of the woman's frantic gasps for air reached his ears.

"Well, I've decided to save your pathetic life freak, but you'll have to promise me something first." He spoke with a calmly amused tone as he watched her squirm, seeing that she was largely beyond the ability to answer, so he continued as though she had. "Stay here until I get back," he answered the unspoken question, and he jammed the sword through her shoulder and deep into the ground, eliciting a week scream and an incredible organic chopping sound as it slid home. She didn't move anymore, and he silently advised her to die before he returned, seeing how much better it would be for her in the long run.

That done, he took off at a quick run in the direction his tracker showed, mostly following the trail of broken ground, cooling slag, and random destruction that marked the progress of the battle. As he ran, he reloaded his pistols, humming a pleasant tune and appreciating the unique smell of a battlefield.

Former Site of the Green Construction Building, Field Medical Facility

Raven sat a few inches above the ground, her cloak trailing onto the dirty rubble as she floated low. She usually preferred something a bit higher up, but she was tired enough that the extra inches were a pain and she didn't really care much at this point considering the patina of dirt already ground into her costume. Of course, these thoughts were only to distract her from the matter at hand, and she scolded herself silently as she took another look over at Skye's prone body where it lay on a cot near her. Lacking anything more pressing to attend to, it was high time to see about how long this guy intended to hang out on another plane of existence.

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinnnthhhooosss," and with her final word, she exhaled slowly, her spirit floating free of her body at last. Tried as she was, it had taken some doing, but her aspect finally floated in the peacefully abstract ether of the astral plane. It was not her first visit here by far, but that didn't stop her from admiring it again as she reveled in the intensely light feeling of being a soul without the burden of a body. It was a pain in the ass to get here, but a fucking vacation to hang out in this souls-only phase of reality.

The world around her was no longer the same as it had been when she'd been in her body, and the alteration quickened even as she observed. She looked down at the empty shell of her corporeal form, the enormous distortion of her previous reality increasing exponentially as her soul's raven form disassociated from it. The colors bled into a symphony of blended rainbows and the world became a riot of random energy. It was all still there, it could even been seen, if you had enough ESP to peer back into actual reality, but now she was free of it all, and it felt very nice. It occurred to her why Skye chose to convalesce over here.

Leisurely, utterly unconcerned with anything for the time being, the raven hopped along a ground that wasn't there, approaching another indistinct point in the void of random color and searching for something. She found it quickly, and it was good.

Astral travelers, if they have one drop of sense in their freely-roaming souls, keep a tiny thread of energy connecting their bodies to their spirits, assuring that they do not get lost in the vastness of astral space. This left the risk of people being able to follow you, but generally the threads were imperceptible except where they connected to the body and where they connected to the soul, so most didn't worry about it. Raven had Skye's thread in her astral grip, and she intended to follow it to this Astral Beacon he so mysteriously mentioned. Intrusive? Yes, but he'd earned it.

An eye out for other astral beings then, the raven took flight, zipping off at a pace so fast that it simply doesn't translate to anything comprehensible for those of us in normal space. As she flew, she left the astral analogue of Earth and entered the sparse spiritual wasteland of empty space. She was cautious, such inhospitable climbs home to native predators of the astral plane that could make a meal of her soul and leave her body to die in its absence, but none the less managed to admire bits of astral real estate she passed on the way. She'd never had cause to venture so far out before, not in this dimension, and she began to wonder why. Just a glimpse of the magnificent and unique palettes of color that represented alien worlds dotting the void was far more interesting that quite a few of the books she'd read lately.

Then, seemingly just as it had begun to get interesting, her journey was over, the thread coming to an end abruptly. Had she not been gripping it so tightly, she might have lost it, but instead she was left to ponder where the hell Skye had gone. No one with any brains at all would ever cut themselves loose from their tether, and one thing Skye hadn't struck her as was brain-dead, so she looked around for what had gone wrong. Her search eventually brought her to the bit of thought-thread in her claw, and she immediately noticed the odd little sphere of white light there.

The sphere was no bigger than a marble, but it held vast intricacies of fine detail in silver and white engraving, stunning Raven for a long moment as she admired the meticulous artistic effort it must have involved. Her aspect molded down into a white-edged black silhouette of her, and she reached out to touch a finger to the marble without hesitation. Everything changed.

Skye's Astral Beacon

It was so sudden that it actually took Raven a long moment to realize she was no longer in astral form. With growing wonder, she looked around with her eyes, took a deep breath of pleasant but unremarkable air, and then was suddenly struck by the fact that she shouldn't have had to do either of those things without her body. Which of course, made her realize that she had her body back, a revelation accompanied by a frantic look down to confirm the rather obvious fact. This was getting weird.

She found herself, rather than floating in the painted infinity of the astral plane, standing on a gloomy doorstep to a rather big and distressingly creepy looking house. Behind her was a landscape done entirely in fog and scraggly dead tree, so she turned back to the gothic-suburban house and glanced at the charming gargoyle-head knocker. She had an indescribable sense that she'd already been here before, so familiar and homey did the place seem. It was almost like she was looking at her dream house, though that couldn't be true, because nothing pleasant ever graced _her_ dreams. Hesitating once more, she allowed her mind to wander to other things, such as, _what_ was she _wearing_?

"_What_ am I _wearing_?" she was forced to express the question out loud for utter confusion at her garb. Her functional cloak and leotard combo, the one she'd worn pretty well constantly since leaving Azar, had been replaced by quite an impressive gown. The dress choked snugly around her neck before running down her shoulders into tight sleeves of intricately embroidered black swirls on a black background stopping at her wrists. The complex embroidering also ran down the front until a black leather girdle took over, pressing in and up and forcing everything she had forward better than any under-wire ever could, a series of black buckles down her abdomen keeping the snug but comfortable affair in place. At her waist and down was a black skirt with a simple pleated ruffle pattern that trailed loosely to her ankles. She could feel stockings that, if the theme continued, would be black, and her shoes felt like leather slippers rather than the custom-fit boots she usually sported.

Though her immediate reaction was to be disgusted by something she would never, ever wear, she couldn't help but think she must look drop dead amazing in it. The color scheme said she was ready for a funeral, but she felt like she was ready for her own wedding, or perhaps some kind of gala ball. This of course, simply reinforced the fact that she would never, ever wear it, but once again she couldn't help but feel good about it, a secret part of her wishing for a full size mirror. Then, the thought occurred to her that Skye had something to do with all this, and anger began to creep inexorably over her good mood. It was time to find out what was going on.

She tried the door and found it locked, so decided that the knocker was her next best bet. The garish thing made an impressively creepy sound, and a thrill of enjoyment ran up her spine, everything about this place perfectly done. After a long moment of waiting, the door swung open of its own accord and she stepped into the house, eager to see what else Skye had cooked up for the place. Her heart fell slightly when she found what the building actually contained.

The moment she stepped through the door, the theme that had persisted on the outside ended, and so did any semblance of spatial continuity. What had appeared to be a rather large building from outside was actually a single room, no more than twenty feet square at best. She stood in a tiny alcove with just enough room for the door to open in, beyond which was the crowded box room. The room was dominated by a enormous, glowing silver orb that hung from the ceiling, around which stood a circle of couches that almost completely choked off the rest of the space. The off-white walls were completely coated in framed pictures that Raven couldn't quite make out, and all in all, it looked like somebody's living room. As she stepped in then, she couldn't help but express her disappointment.

"This… isn't quite what I expected," she mumbled out loud, forgetting that there was obviously at least one person within earshot.

"I'm sorry if it isn't to your liking, I'm afraid I can hardly compete with your own imagination as far as decorating to your preferences is concerned," came Skye's voice, and Raven jumped slightly at the unexpected response. His voice came from one of the couches, and she began to walk to one side until he finally came into view. Indeed, he was lounging gracelessly, lying full out on one of his curving, gray leather couches, a handsome jet-black cat napping on his chest. He wore a pair of jogging shorts, an open, short-sleeved button-down, and nothing else (except the cat, which doesn't count), not even sunglasses. The black cloth contrasted sharply with the white gleam of his sharply defined muscles, and Raven choked down a blush by force of extreme willpower as her libido tried to hijack her brain.

"What are you talking about?" she asked him, changing the subject in her own mind as she forced herself to look to the walls, gazing with feigned interest at photos she didn't really see. "this place is yours, so didn't you make the outside along with… everything else?" She couldn't help but hesitate as she thought again of the dress.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him sit up and look over at her for the first time, dislodging the cat with an indignant yowl, and suddenly his whole body froze like someone had just struck him. When she realized it was because of her, she turned completely away from him with a jerk to hide the blush that she couldn't stop this time. Behind her was the sound of him recovering and standing up, then his response in that always-cool tone of his.

"I never bothered modeling the outside, so it takes on the form of whatever the person looking at it most wants to see. I control every other aspect of this place's appearance, except of course for anything pertaining to other spirits visiting. Now that I see what you cooked up for yourself… well, I feel a little underdressed." The quip coincided with a strange rushing of air, and Raven turned back to look at him with another jerk, the heat at her face forgotten with her curiosity and anger at his teasing. When she looked at him again, he had changed.

He now wore a very nice black tuxedo with sliver accoutrements, done in an old-fashioned style that included a vest and a spill of lace at his throat. If anything he looked even better, and Raven gulped down her embarrassment as she stood her ground this time. She was definitely getting more than she bargained for out of this visit, as now the two of them were dressed to kill for a night in high society (if it was a society of vampires—the gothic theme persisted, after all).

This fact seemed not lost on Skye, because even as she looked on the room itself morphed in a swirl of color and rushing air. In a moment, it was immensely larger. The ceiling was still dominated by that silver orb, now embedded in a gorgeous chandelier, but otherwise the space was completely transformed. The couches had vanished, the nondescript carpeting replaced by the intricate tiles of an enormous dance floor. To one side was a sweeping stairway that went straight up to a landing and split in a T to either side up to a set of twin balconies.

"What are doing?" Raven felt compelled to inquire, even as she continued to take in the altered surroundings.

"Hey, you're the one that came in dressed for a party, I'm just going with the flow here. We didn't match the décor in my crash-room anymore, so I inculturated my living space a little. Do you like it?"

"Hmph," she sniffed, "I didn't come here to play dress up with you!" and she successfully blocked his attempt at charm with a solid wall of indignant pride. She was finally getting over her shock and falling back into a safe state of mind.

"Okay," and Skye actually sounded a little disappointed at her rejection of his purely innocent posturing, "so what does bring you to my humble astral abode? I can't imagine you were simply 'in the neighborhood,'" and there was a quirk at the side of his mouth at some internal humor. That cat was back, and it leapt into his arms as he waited for her answer. Leave it to him to ask her a hard question, not that she wouldn't have done the same to him.

"I…" this was going to be tough, "I… I just wanted to see that you were okay." And she felt her pulse quicken with embarrassment, "I mean, you helped me out enough to warrant me at least checking up on you," she quickly clarified, not wanting him to get the wrong impression. She couldn't help but think that life would be so much easier if she could be sure of what she felt the wrong impression was at this point.

"I see…" he muttered uncertainly as he strode slowly toward her, petting the black cat slowly, prompting her to stiffen slightly at his advance, "well as you can see, I'm recovering. I had to pretty well break my brain to shake that… _thing_… out of your mind, and it'll take me a good long while to get back to full power, but I've been through this a couple of times now and I've got it down to a system."

"What do you mean?" she asked, genuinely curious to know what kind of a system one used to recover from near mind-death. He obliged her curiosity with one of those long explanations of his.

"Working solo is damn dangerous, especially when you're already in a profession with such a disgusting fatality rate. My powers give me a distinct edge, but I've had to push my limits quite a few times, and… well let's just say earlier was only my most recent and terrifying brush with the reaper. I discovered after an earlier and much less severe episode that there's a way to stop the disintegration of the psyche that comes with overreaching mental limits, and that would be the purpose of that orb up there, my astral beacon. Every time my mind is nearly eradicated, it ends up here, where I can piece the broke-ass thing back together again."

Raven didn't quite know how to respond to this, so caught up was she in what he'd said at the start. This guy she didn't even really know had shattered his own mind rather than leave her to the mercy of the Hate… he'd _shattered his mind_… for her!

"You didn't have to do that you know," she muttered, turning away from him as he drew within a few steps of her and stopped. She hadn't asked him for his help, she hadn't asked him for anything at all, the familiar complaint echoed through her mind once more. Why had he done that?

"Yes well, I guess I did take something of a risk on the rescue there, but there's really no big mystery to it." He paused and sighed slightly as though thinking something serious, and the cat yowled again as he let it leap to the ground before continuing.

"Raven, if nothing else, I already consider you my friend, and I would never leave a friend in the clutches of that which was using your body. My senses told me it was do or die to save you, that there wouldn't be another chance, and so I took the shot while I had it. I prefer a long recuperation by far to the thought of loosing you forever…" and he had the grace to sound embarrassed by the unflinching honesty of his statement, turning away from her even as she glanced in frowning, guarded surprise over her shoulder in response.

"You… you really mean that?" she asked, turning the rest of the way back toward him and unconsciously closing the distance between them another step, her dull tone lighting slightly with her shock. He turned back to her and gave her a good look in the eyes, his empty whites to her violet pools, and nodded slowly.

"If you don't believe my word, you can always take into consideration the fact that I coded my control core to allow you entry. A greater sign of trust I know not in this world," and his eyes never flinched from hers.

"So I take it you noticed my… 'borrowing' your powers," she admitted with a mild embarrassment. It was never comfortable knowing someone had been into the deepest part of your mind, and she was _particularly_ uncomfortable with _him_ knowing that _she'd_ been in _his_.

"Before you ask, I did it for the very reason I just mentioned. I trust you, implicitly, and I knew that my fate as well as that of untold masses of other people hinged on that trust. I'm the type to trust my instincts more than common sense, you know?"

"Yeah, well just don't expect the same gesture from me any time soon," she muttered at him, her intense discomfort about the whole subject shattering the moment they'd been sharing as she broke eye contact and began to look around the room again. "I'm just glad you're not dead."

"Why Raven, I believe that's about the nicest thing you've ever said to me," he teased her, and she felt anger overcome her discomfort with ease. She was about to lash out at him when she realized he'd done it on purpose to quell her discomfort, the manipulative bastard. Left at a loss for words then, instead she asked a question about something that had caught her eye.

"Skye, who're the people in that portrait up there?" and he seemed a bit surprised by the change of subject. Said painting was an enormous affair done in a classical style like everything else in this manifestation of Skye's, it hung in a position that dominated the split in the T stairway, and it held three young people. A boy, pale as snow and with those empty white eyes, had to be Skye at some incredibly young age. He wore a nice blue suit, and on either side of him was a little girl, one wearing a white dress and the other wearing a black dress. The girls were twins, identical except that the one in black had long curly black hair and the one in white had long straight white and silver hair, an oddity at her age to be sure. They were not albino, each had a healthy pink coloration to go with their beautiful dresses and long hair. The most striking feature by far though were their eyes, the dark twin having irises as black as deep midnight, and the light twin having irises with a rainbow of different colors all radiating out like the spokes of a wheel. It was quite the imposing sight.

"Ah yes," Skye finally followed her gaze up to the painting, "that would be a family portrait. The strapping young lad is me, and the two beauties are my sisters. The dark one is Zeph, and the light one is Ora. Does that answer your question?"

"So they were twins, huh?" Raven commented idly as she continued to marvel at the way the painting put so much expression into the eyes. "What about the rest of your family? Your parents maybe?"

"I tend not to dignify my parents with an acknowledgement that they once existed… they never earned even that from me. As for _him_… never mind," and he cut himself off just as he was about to continue. Raven noted that he had more family still, then chided herself for prying where he obviously didn't want anyone looking. She had enough family problems of her own, and she wasn't about to start espousing them to him, that was for sure. Her thoughts were interrupted by an insistent rubbing on her leg, which along with a piercing meow, brought her attention once more to the cat. As she bent to obey its demand for attention, she wondered why Skye hadn't erased this thing when he changed the room.

"We didn't match your 'crash room,' but this handsome fellow did?" she asked him as she scratched the trim tom's head, and the cat purred as though it recognized her compliment.

"Hey," and there was a puff of amusement in his voice, "I told you already that I can't affect other spirits visiting this place." It took her a long moment to understand the implications of what he'd just said.

"So wait," and she couldn't keep the incredulity out of her voice, "you're telling me that this is the spirit of an actual cat? A _cat_? On the _astral_ _plane_?" It was preposterous of course, and she knew he had to be pulling her leg. The thought annoyed her seriously, and the familiar feeling was a great comfort.

"Ben there is a very special cat Raven," Skye persisted, and she began to wonder how far he planned to drag this out. "He's a specter, a kind of extremely advanced spirit construction, and he's also most of the company I've had for the better part of five years, so I'd thank you not to insult him." Raven, despite having heard of such things before, couldn't bring herself to drop the comforting distrust, and spoke thoughtlessly in defiance of what he'd asked.

"He really doesn't look like much to me," she muttered, as she stood up away from the cat, and a sudden yowling from the animal surprised her and forced her a step back. Without further warning, the cat coiled and sprung at her chest, and she lifted her hands to defend herself only to watch in amazement as the animal passed right through her arms and disappeared into her stomach.

"Oh dear, you really shouldn't have said that Raven," admonished Skye amusedly as the oddest sensation began to spread through her body. She gave him an angry look that promised all kinds of retribution for this experience as the warm rubbing feeling really got into gear. It didn't hurt, and she didn't think it was causing her any harm, but it was terribly uncomfortable, and she wanted it to stop.

"Skye, get your cat off of me!" she snapped at him, as she pressed her hands over her stomach and fell to her knees.

"It's a _cat_, Raven, not an attack dog. I can't _order_ it to do anything. However, he's a very compassionate and forgiving soul, so I figure you stand a good chance of getting off the hook if you apologize."

"You want me to apologize to a cat?" but he met her viciously skeptical gaze with a steady smile and those empty white eyes, and some of the anger left her. She somehow knew that he wasn't putting her on here, and decided that the feeling was obnoxious enough to warrant any measure to stop it.

"Ben, I'm sorry, you're a very handsome cat!" she tried her best for sincerity over the sensation of fur rubbing all over the inside of her skin, and was rewarded momentarily by a respite. In a smooth movement, a shadowy silhouette of a cat emerged from her skin like a pool of darkness standing up off of her body, then swirled around her a few times until it finally stood on her shoulder, the inky figure settling back into this odd sort of reality and becoming only a cat again. She grimaced, gave it another long rub, then pressed insistently until it leapt away from her. Her ordeal over, she glanced at Skye, who, though she couldn't be sure, looked like he was trying his best _not_ to look smug.

"Why is your cat specter named Ben?" she asked him, voicing another random curiosity that had popped into her mind, considering anything preferable to standing in silence with this exceptionally strange young man.

"He's really my sisters' cat, and they named him Benvolio after the first time they saw 'Romeo and Juliet.' I don't remember what planet we were on at the time, but I had just gotten another big data file on earth culture from someplace or another and that was among the things I shared with them. I mentioned that he was my favorite character from the play and blamo, their kitten specter suddenly had a name."

Raven felt a sudden and confusing pang of simultaneous jealousy and sadness for Skye, his story of happy family memories something she could never imagine. At the same time, she knew he couldn't recall what he felt during those good times, and now his sisters were at the mercy of some mysteriously vicious organization she'd never even heard of until a few hours back. The two of them really were a pair of miserable souls.

He must have noticed how down she suddenly became, because he took immediate measures to liven the situation up. In retrospect, she would kind of whish he'd just left her alone.

"So, Raven, care for anything else while you're here?" he changed the subject with a cheerful question. "Perhaps you'd treat me to a dance—we are both dressed for it after all?" and he gave her a radiant smile as he bowed slightly to his prospective dance partner.

"What are you—" was all she got out before he gently gripped her hand and spun her through a graceful twirl, then put an arm around her and dipped her back.

"A waltz perhaps?" he asked, and suddenly 'Blue Danube' kicked up in the background like a soundtrack. It was just about then when her mind caught up with her body.

Crack! was the sound of her fist impacting with his jaw at high speed, and she slipped out of his grip even as his head whipped around from the force of the blow. The moment she hit him, the sound track vipped into silence like someone had just scratched a record off the player, and he fell to one knee as he held his jaw in shock.

"First of all, _don't ever touch me without my permission_!" she snapped lividly, putting all kinds of murderous threat into the tone, "second, how the _hell_ did you touch me without the… you know… shock thing?" and her tone was a bit more subdued and uncertain as she wondered at that.

"Sorry, I got a little carried away," his voice distorted as he apologized from behind the hand that held his jaw, "and as for the shock thing, it seems to require our corporeal shells as a catalyst. Despite all appearances, we don't have them here."

"Well…" and now she was a little uncomfortable about being near him, searching for some response to cover how much he'd shaken her, "just… remember that in the future," she muttered, and turned away again, arms crossed over her chest in indignation. Only gods could know what would have happened there if her reflexes hadn't kicked in.

"Like I said, _sorry_… but you know, you really can't blame me for trying," and there was a hint of humor in his voice now.

"What do you mean?" she asked cautiously, not bothering to turn back.

"I mean my PV is so gorged on hate that I have nothing to mitigate the certain knowledge that you're the most attractive woman I've ever seen," he let the words out so smoothly that it didn't even sound like a line. She spun to look at him again, shock painted in volumes all over her face, but he refused to meet her increasingly defensive stare as he shrugged in hopeless abandon, continuing with, "I _definitely_ deserved the facial readjustment, but I cant help but feel it was worth it. I mean, the way you look right now," and he took a quick glance as though to refresh his memory, "I'd have been crazy not to at least _try_ for a dance."

"What—What are you talking about?" she asked, her voice now half panic and half confusion as he continued to act so incredibly different than before. All of his smarmy self-assurance and almost obnoxiously complete competence seemed to waste away under the lens of what he was feeling now, and without those grotesque features to iron out her own feelings she was thrown completely off guard. She wanted very little more than to escape this place, regretting ever bothering to worry about his weird, supernaturally attractive hide.

"Come now Raven, observe with me," he said calmly, apparently taking her question seriously, and the change in his tone to explanatory allowed her to cool off some herself. She looked where he indicated and a perfectly rectangular mirror suddenly grew out of the ground three feet in front of her and stretched out until it showed her whole body, accompanied by his question, "Is that not one of the most irresistible sights you've ever beheld?"

Raven's confused feelings were driven suddenly from her mind as she realized she'd been wrong about one thing: she wasn't drop dead gorgeous. The image that stared back at her right now possessed the kind of beauty that surpasses mere adjectives, and she really had to move around a little to make sure the reflection was actually her own. By far no narcissist, she'd still be the first to admit that what she saw now belonged in a magazine or on an artist's canvas, and she couldn't rightfully understand how it could be true.

"So you have to ask yourself Raven, not 'why did that prick Skye make a pass at me,' but rather, 'why did I manifest looking like this when I knew I would see him?'" He let the supremely arrogant question hang in the air, the sudden change in his whole persona registering in the small part of Raven's mind that wasn't blinded with shock at the stranger she saw in the mirror. Later, she'd recognize that she'd scared him off with her reaction, and he'd slid back into the mask of aloof IDP agent with which she'd been so much more comfortable. For now though, she could only wonder at what she saw as he continued, "In any case, I apologize once more. I honestly don't know what came over me back there…" Raven wasn't really listening anymore, and it was as Skye realized this that he trailed off.

"You know," he added, almost tentative in his manner now, as though afraid she'd hit him again, "this isn't the best view." She was only dimly aware of his words, so stunned was she by what she could look like with a little polish, and he walked up behind her, maintaining two steps of clearance for his own safety.

"I always preferred this one by far," and the image in the mirror changed completely. Raven almost fell over this time, because what she now saw was not a reflection of her body, but that of her soul. Her heart began to burn with a heat she couldn't recognize, her eyes teared up despite her best efforts, and she began to loose strength in her legs.

"This is how I usually see people," Skye continued to talk behind her, "it's what you might call 'inner beauty,' may it never be scoffed at again. Truly good people always look beautiful when you examine their souls, but ones like this, and like those of your friends, are rare beyond description."

Raven could barely hear him as she let the image before her burn into her memory. The figure was a cloak of shadow like inky midnight, but within the black was the infinite spectrum of color that exists beyond the cusp of pitch black, a whirlwind of purples, blues, greens, all tinged by the utter black they swirled within. Tracers of white that burned the eyes moved constantly, etching endlessly intricate patterns of arcane runes, mystic spirals, and shapes without name across her multicolor skin, only for them to fade into the dark surface and provide new space for the tracers to illustrate. Her face though, was the true marvel, four burning white eyes with brilliantly violet swirling pupils gracing a surface otherwise devoid of feature. A flash of silver struck her eye as she examined her reflection, and she looked up, catching sight of a second image to sear the senses.

Skye's soul was also reflected in the mirror, standing just behind her, and it was such a bright silver white that she could hardly look at it. The waves of brilliant energy hit the waves of dark energy coming off of her, and rather than explode as they had back on Earth, they twined and coiled about one another in a dance of mutualistic harmony. As she watched, they grew together, flowed through one another, and expanded into glowing clouds of breathtaking gray, a color she hadn't even imagined possible.

"BLLLLAAAHHHH" barked a sudden terrible siren, and Raven nearly jumped out of her skin. The sound came like a kick in the chest, accompanied by a flashing red light that seemed to permeate the whole room without regard for where shadows should be cast. Just like that, she was only herself and Skye was just himself, the spirit-insight he'd granted her evaporating as the alert sounded.

"DAMNIT!" he shouted, though whether it was at the moment that had been interrupted or at the nature of the interruption itself she couldn't be sure. "Not now… I haven't healed enough yet… _goddamn_, I'm so fucked…" he muttered then, barely audible over the siren. He collected himself quickly though.

"Raven!" he shouted at her, "our bodies are in danger, we've got to snap back _now_!"

Green's Secondary Base, a while earlier

Starfire and Robin were still listening when the battle broke out. The directional microphone shorted loudly when the gunfire started, and Robin cringed once for the squealing in his ear and a second time for the bloom of blood that sprouted from the swarthy looking man's shoulder as it exploded in gore. He'd had to restrain Starfire with a forceful hand since Slade had taken it upon himself to brag about what he'd done to Terra, and now that the fighting raged it was all he could do to keep her head down.

The dimly lit street below was alive with action, lances of laser light with the accompanying pop-crackle of burning air competing with spectacular explosions of flame and stone. Even as he watched, the wounded man glared at Terra, a quickly rising stone pillar before her exploding in flames as the heat leapt from the man's eyes. He somehow cast translucent globules of heat through the air that would strike and incinerate his targets, and Robin suddenly had him figured as a pyrokinetic.

On the right, the huge man from before was flailing in agony and holding his face, the surprise beam to the eye having taken him out of the fight faster than Robin could believe considering the punishment the Titans had dished out to no effect. His flailing kicked up a stupendous racket of pounding that shattered the street below his feet and sent wreckage flying every which way. A blindly pitched hunk of stone was launched like a cannonball directly at their building, and the two rolled away from the corner as it disintegrated into a shower of pebbles with the ground shaking impact.

When he next looked down, Terra had taken a perch on a raised pillar to stare down at the pyrokinetic, who's return gaze bore a barely dodged wave of incinerating heat that slaged the top of the pillar like a candle wick an instant after she leapt away. When she hit the ground, several tons of stone bounced up from the impact and suspended in the air, the veritable fleet of boulders pausing only an instant before they began to spear bullet-like at the pyro. The incoming rocks melted to glowing muck and fell in splattering streaks to the ground in front of him, the sheer volume of stone actually pressing him back until he was forced to run to the side, the streaks of molten stone dogging his steps as he dodged. He took cover behind a particularly large hunk of wreckage just as Terra's ammunition ran out, and she fell to her knee as she gasped for air after the exertion. Robin's heart leapt into his throat as she just barely avoided being crushed when another flailing slap from the brute sent a wall of broken road her direction.

"Robin, we can delay no longer!" pleaded Starfire, gripping the hand he held her back with fiercely, as though to remind him it was only by her consent that she staid her attack. He hesitated for only a moment before answering.

"You're right Star, we'll have to take our chances. Just remember that she isn't our friend right now, she Slade's weapon—she _won't_ recognize us and she may try to _kill_ us!" He waited for her to acknowledge this grim fact with a small nod, then it was up and over for the both of them.

Robin himself hooked a grapple to the building and used the wench to break his headlong fall, rappelling once halfway down then hitting the ground at a run. He took a quick glance around for Slade, but the man was nowhere to be seen, nor was the blond woman, so he took a chance and sprinted through the wreckage of the building's front, eyes open for the brute and his friend. Leaping around a pile of stone, he came face to equally surprised face with the pyrokinetic man, who was nursing his gory, busted shoulder, then made a snap decision and underhanded the guy an explosive disk as he used his momentum to round the next corner. He heard a yell of surprise followed by the sound of running, his explosive going off, then the sound of laser fire again, and he knew Slade had gotten some shots off at him after the guy had left his cover. He would have appreciated the humor more if he hadn't bumped into the brute the next moment.

The huge man had apparently regained enough vision to walk around, because he was currently marching his slow but unstoppable way toward Terra where she lie on the ground gasping for air. Robin was about to grab the guy's attention away from the helpless looking girl when a spike of stone leapt from the ground just in front of the brute, Robin's reflexes saving him from a beheading as his side-roll got him out of the way of the flying muscleman. He heard the guy hit a building behind him even as he simultaneously caught a glimpse of Slade disappearing behind a wall of smoking stone and an artificial wall of stone intercepting another heat blast on his right. The place had become a war zone, attacks happening so quickly in so many directions that he could barely keep track of them.

The next series of events came like a blur to Robin, but he would later recall them much like this. Terra was down, the last wall she threw up sucking down all she had left, a night of heavy lifting and building demolition leaving her dry in this high-power battle. Robin didn't have to look twice before he sprung from his prone position and closed the distance to her, practically able to hear the next heat blast closing in. As he dove in and swept her twig-light body off the ground, the pyrokinetic wave flash heated the air behind him, the gut-twisting agony of the singeing he received causing him to stumble and fall only a foot or two from where he'd grabbed his burden up, well within sight of the firebug.

As he hit the ground, he rolled off Terra and ripped his cape off before the white-hot alloy could touch his skin, the intense heat failing to slag it but easily fusing the fibers until it was a board-stiff slab of glowing metal. In the same movement, he drew some smoke grenades and had them out in the general direction of the pyro, obscuring them from his view and hopefully covering them from his next attack. Sure enough, the next heat blast when wide left and created a crater of melted asphalt a few feet down, and Robin took the opportunity to drag Terra's frighteningly light dead weight into some taller wreckage further down the road. One more near miss with a heat blast and Robin began to wonder where the hell Starfire had gotten to, which was of course the same moment that she decided to show up, streaking down from somewhere on his right.

"I am sorry for my absence," she gasped out, and he took from the filthy state of her costume that she had good reason, "I was trading fire with the heat-maker when I was intercepted by a very large piece of flying rock. It took me some time to escape. But hurry, we must now get away!" and she grabbed up both of them as she leapt into the air. Long training told Robin where his eyes needed to be, and he glanced back at the smoke screen just in time to see a glowing red figure stride through it.

"Starfire!" and his incoherent scream was miraculously interpreted, with a wrenching in his guts being Star dumping her passengers and climbing furiously while a heat blast arced between them. As he fell, he looked up to see another blast reach out for Starfire, a quick pair of blasts from her eyes splitting the attack and glancing it off to melt holes in the buildings to either side.

The nest instant, Robin bundled Terra up protectively and hit the ground in a roll, putting more distance between them and their assailant, then ducking behind the corner of a building at the next intersection as the sidewalk behind him erupted into glowing magma from the heat that struck it. Placing Terra gently on the ground, he drew some birdarangs and leapt out from behind the corner, ready to strike or dodge as need be. Instead he found himself spectator to an epic struggle.

Starfire and the pyro were currently head to head, a shimmering of intense heat blasting forth from the man's face to be met by an enormous green starbolt projecting from Star's eyes and hands at the same time. As he watched in awe, star fusion met psi-fire, two titanic powers struggling to incinerate one another in an orgy of projected energy.

At first they were even, the green and the shimmering heats colliding and annihilating one another directly between them as he stood on the ground and she flew about ten feet higher up. Starfire suddenly gained some ground, pressing the enormous beam a few feet closer to the man, until he braced his footing and took a step forward, forcing her beam back and actually gaining ground himself from the original position. She threw her energy into it again and fought back to the original position, but it was clear that she was no match for him as he began to chuckle audibly over the sound of frying air. The pyro's red aura grew then and Robin prepared to intercede, only to pause again when Starfire began to scream a terrifying war cry.

The piercing wail was literally painful, and he covered his ears as he knelt away form the source, looking up to see the green glow spread from Starfire's hands and eyes until it enveloped her whole body. The beam she was throwing quickly grew twice as thick, the enormous funnel of power putting off heat Robin could feel all the way back where he was standing. The man met the renewed burst with force, loosing ground steadily but only pressing all the harder into his own blast in response. Starfire's beam was quickly only a few feet away, and he began to scream himself as he pressed against it, his return blast defecting heat every which way until the lampposts, asphalt, and the sides of the buildings all around them began to light on fire or melt. Finally, the man's snazzy red suit began to be eaten away by licking flames of green fire that leaked through his pressing blast, his _own_ _flesh_ following in its turn. As the flames began to blacken his skin and peel it away, Robin was sickened, unable to believe he could continue with injuries like that. He actually began to fear Starfire would kill him before he gave up. Then Starfire's scream gave out, and he was struck by the opposite and much more immediate terror of loosing her.

Her blast faltered as her voice did, and the man, on his knees with weakness, yelled out in victory as his blast ate up the space between them and threatened to wipe Starfire from the sky. Robin could take it no more, and without further hesitation, he flipped a razor-sharp blade at the monster trying to incinerate his love, aiming for the carotid without compunction. The blade, able to withstand spectacular heat, none the less warped slightly from the blast-furnace the space in front of the man had become, arcing off course and slicing an awful gash in his arm, destroying his concentration and allowing the last of Starfire's green energy to zip through the unresisting air and hit him like a ton of ultra-hot bricks. He flew backward, hit the side of a building, and did not move again. Robin didn't really care though, because Starfire hit the ground the next moment.

He was over to her in a flash, and his heart didn't start beating again until he was sure that she was still breathing. From the looks of things, she'd just exhausted her power, and now she lay once more unconscious. Glancing down the street then, Robin did his best to glare through the darkness, the intermittent fires, the clouds of inky smoke, and the concealing wreckage, then wasted no time in making their escape. Slipping one arm under her neck and one under her knees, he lifted her up and dashed back over to where he'd stowed Terra, already wondering how he was supposed to move both of them and silently praying for Starfire to awaken.

(Slade)

When Slade cleared the edge of the area his disruptor rifle had lain waste to, he was much better able to see down the road, and immediately he noticed the blazing building to building fires and the drooping, melted street lights that marked the passage of that fire-powered fellow he'd winged earlier. What he did not se was the broken earth and piled stone he'd come to associate with his young charge, and the absence told him he'd either find her ashes or some similar remains quite soon, with death being the only explanation for her cessation of combat. The thought came with a wave of ambivalence on his part, since he'd written her off as expendable the moment the dark titan had gotten away with knowledge of her existence. Without the promise of seeing them when they first realized he'd tricked them all, the girl just wasn't as valuable a trophy anymore. He'd regret loosing the weapon, but then, there were other weapons in this world.

That was when he spotted the curious spectacle of a rather diminutive figure toting two other figures, and he expelled all other consideration from his mind. He recognized the scene after a moment of observation, and changed from his jogging stride to a much more stealthy movement as he drew nearer. This was an opponent who he hadn't expected, but who none the less promised him a spot more of surprise enjoyment out of the night.

Suddenly his prey cursed, leapt forward, dropped his burdens, and came out of his roll facing Slade, who was at a loss as to how the little bastard had detected him. Of course, he'd always been surprising Slade with his ability, it was just a bitch that this wouldn't go as smoothly as he'd planned.

"Slade, you _can't_ have her back—_never_ _again_!" Robin declared immediately, and Slade knew right away that the little shit was trying to steal away his weapon. As he glared silently back in response, he was forced to wonder how the hell these rugrats kept finding him, their constant interruptions of his business with Green's gang beginning to seriously annoy him. Then his annoyance faded somewhat as Robin answered his silence with a leaping kick, and Slade was back to his element.

With a sidestep and a quick throw, he launched Robin by the conveniently offered leg and sent him flying down the street and away from the two women. He caught himself from the fall, and flipped back to his feet, launching himself at Slade again and drawing his staff for this one. Slade quickdrew his phaser and put two beams into the twirling baton before Robin could close half the distance, and the boy was forced to falter and retreat as his weapon was melted apart on both ends. The shock in his eyes at Slade's display of marksmanship tickled the man, and he chuckled as the slight fear washed into the boy, his determination to overcome Slade making it all the more amusing. It was so good, in fact, that Slade decided it would be enough for this night.

"So you've resorted to using guns to get your dirty work done now, huh? With all the people you manipulated into serving you, I kind of thought you were allergic to getting your hands dirty like that," Robin attempted to taunt him as he held a fighter's stance, eyes watching the barrel of the gun so he'd know how to dodge when it came to shooting. Slade admired his tenacity, but really didn't have time to deal with the children right now, and so his twisted mind found a quick and intensely amusing method of extricating himself from the boy's petty designs at vengeance.

"Oh Robin… don't be so quick to judge!" Slade admonished him with a mocking tone that infuriated the already dangerously pissed boy, "That I've resorted to getting things done personally is only a measure of the respect I have for my opponents. You should feel _proud_ that I've promoted you from something for my lackeys to deal with and up to something on _my_ to do list."

"_Damn you Slade!_" he shouted, but any attack he planned was quelled by a shot Slade put through the few inches between his right hand and utility belt, burning both slightly and causing him to jump back, face red with impotent Rage.

"Now, now, Robin, let's not be hasty. I have to go deal with grown up business tonight, but I promise I'll take care of you and your pathetic little friends when I'm not so busy."  
"You're not going anywhere!" Robin protested, and Slade warded him off with a second warning shot as he motioned as though to attack. This one burnt his hand a little more closely, and still Slade could see the way he tensed, so very much desiring to flip out some of those blades of his and strike at him. Equally the man could see the boy's fear, the fear that Slade was too fast for him. He'd always known the child had some sense in his head, because Slade _was_ too fast for him, and would not hesitate to execute him here and now should he be stupid enough to attack. Slade was a glutton for self-denial, in his own unique way, and would not hesitate to cut off his chance of later having the boy at his nonexistent mercy should the situation call for it.

"Well Robin, I beg to differ— mueh heh heh heh," and his evil chuckle made the child's eyes go wide as he realized that Slade had something up his sleeve, "because it would seem that I have a bargaining chip!"

"What—" Robin began, but Slade cut him off, gesturing to his right even as he bellowed for his weapon.

"Terra!" he barked, and the girl, to all appearances unconscious, rose slowly from the ground in response. He marveled slightly himself at the power he held over her, then finished his orders while the boy was still distracted by his own surprise. "Take out your sidearm, place the barrel in your mouth, then prepare to fire," he said simply, and Robin had just enough time to scream his protest and rush past Slade to the girl before she finished complying.

"_Stop right there_!" Slade commanded, and Robin froze in his attempt to yank the girl's trembling hands away from her head. He was too late, and he stepped away as he realized this with an accompanying wave of horror that delighted Slade immensely. The girl stood wavering on her feet, her compulsion to obey Slade's orders only slightly more powerful than the exhaustion that malnutrition, extensive torture, tranquilizer overdose, and high-powered super combat had wrought on her body. None the less Slade had won again, and the feeling was quite the high as he watched Robin's face crumble in defeat.

"Now boy, I suggest you leave me and my toy to my other business, or else the next thing you hear will be this… _husk_… that used to be your friend ventilating her brains on my command!" and just saying the phrase made Robin wince to such an extent that Slade was tempted to give the order anyway. It was a brief struggle to decide if he was more interested in dragging Green's carcass away while it could still be salvaged or seeing Robin's face as Terra cooked her own brains, but the former won out decisively when he recalled that only one was actually time-sensitive. Robin would yet see Terra's shell motivate itself off this mortal coil, but he had more pressing things to attend to right now.

"You… you wouldn't give her up!" Robin struggled pathetically against the reality of the situation by accusing Slade of bluffing.

"Please boy, show a little more of that intelligence I once thought worthy of my legacy! I care little for this rag-doll, and will be quite pleased to continue making use of it only as long as I can have the satisfaction of keeping her from the insipid children that actually care for the mindless lump of flesh. In short, as long as you don't have her, I don't care what happens to her!" Slade's words rang true, and Robin fell to his knees in submission. Such was an intense delight to Slade, and he ordered the doll to follow him as he strode slowly away, confident that the boy would not strike at his back. Then, a final twisted thought crept into Slade's mind, he and turned himself and his puppet back toward Robin one last time.

"Oh Robin!" he shouted, gaining the defeated young man's attention, "something to remember me by!" and he quickdrew a needle laser with his left and fired a shot for the boy's shoulder. A shriek of pain annouced that he'd struck something, and when the dazzling trail of light faded, he couldn't have been happier. The other girl-child, the little alien bitch, had awakened at some point, somehow managing to trace the barrel of his pistol and get her arm between it and the boy. The black burn on her wrist was nothing compared to the tiny, fully-through hole it would have put in the boy's flesh and bones, but the shock and anger on his face at the woman's pain was reward enough to Slade.

"_You bastard_!" he shouted, and Slade caught the quick underhand movement just in time to grab his puppet and yank her over a few feet. The birdarang glanced along her pronounced ribs, cutting a deep gash in her side that began to bleed into her bodysuit before its special fibers could seal the wound. The mindless one choked out a groan of agony around the phaser pistol in her mouth, and he realized he'd probably have to carry her back to the van, but this inconvenience was well worth the way Robin had gone white as a sheet as he cradled his woman in his arms. The two of them looked at him with a kind of broken expression that once again recalled to him the battlefields of his youth, and with that, he considered his night complete.

He laughed uproariously into the darkness as he left, his great bursts of evil mirth barely audible over the sound of the blazing fires that now raged through the block. Without concern for her involuntary squeals of pain or the gun barrel still lodged in her mouth, he slung Terra over his shoulder and began to jog back through the fires toward his van, leaving behind his defeated opponents. His mind floated on a sea of victory, and he reveled in it.

Former Site of the Green Construction Building, Field Medical Base

(Snapback— By using the tether to his or her body, an astral traveler can return to the corporeal shell in an amount of time that is effectively instantaneous. This has the advantage of being far faster than regular astral travel, but has been reported to "sting like the dickens.")

Skye was stunned momentarily as he felt his spirit hit his body and nearly crack into pieces with the force of his arrival. For a terrifying instant, it felt like his soul would be shattered by the impact, and everything was a searing hot agony as he lay on his cot. He hurt so much he couldn't even think, and that is the true nightmare to telepaths. However, despite the agony, the sting of his danger sense going off like the fricken Fourth of July inside his skull pounded its way through, and his body reacted to that impulse without his agonizing mind's further consent, flipping his legs up off the cot and sending his whole body heels over head just in time for the sound of steel hitting stone at high speed to pierce his ears.

The agony passed its intense initial stage to call out less desperately from the background as his mind got back into kilter. Just in time, as another scream from his danger sense sent him rolling to the side and flipping backward blindly from the intense threat he'd yet to actually see. He used the space he'd bought himself to take a deep breath and force his ESP into functionality. It came with difficulty and an intense headache, but the restoration of sight was like some great opiate to Skye's mind, and he was able to deal with all the pain. What he could not deal with was the piece of really sharp metal heading directly for his skull.

A quick twisting dodge saved his head from being impaled, but whatever was attacking him didn't stop with that, and he let his ESP guide him through a series of dodges that soon even his own forebrain couldn't follow anymore. One moment he was flipping to the side to avoid a blade, the next he was throwing himself through a desperate roll to avoid another. Talloned claws and spears jabbed at him in a flurry so fast that he had to fall back, their speed far beyond his ability to dodge. All around him people were screaming, spirits flaring in terror everywhere threatening to disrupt his senses, no room left in his mind for anything but keeping a step ahead of the incessant attacks. His assailant wasn't letting up, and Skye retreated as quickly as possible through a series of nimble backflips, panic creeping up on him as he began to realize why exactly he was having so much trouble identifying his attacker.

The moment's reprieve bought by his retreat gave Skye enough time to pry open his eyes for a more mundane glance at the being able to attack with impunity through his ESP, to strike without him being able to see it at all, and to seek his head without a single malicious thought entering the ether. Though the floodlights and road flares the emergency personnel had brought in provided only dim light, his eyes still filled with tears against the pain of vision, the ordeal earning Skye a glance at the murderous beast even now staring at him. It was a robot.

"_Why_ did it have to be a _fucking_ robot?" he asked himself, desperation creeping into his voice as his senses began to tell him that the possible futures including his survival were evaporating like morning dew from the endless grassy field of what-might-be. The depth of the shit he'd landed in now could only be measured in fathoms, with the mechanical monstrosity taking a moment out, almost certainly analyzing his movement patterns to devise a way of trapping him. Skye used the moment for a number of different things.

First, he took in the monster's appearance while his eyes still held out. Before he snapped them shut against the burning the light was giving them, he knew that the thing was no ordinary attack droid. The light-frame beast was neither heavily armored nor particularly durable-looking, a fact that belied the terrifying effectiveness it had for its specially intended purpose. The lack of armor could be quickly contributed to the fact that the thing was constructed entirely of a jet-black plastic invisible to ESP, much as the mind trap Robin had once flaunted was. The remaining bunch of highly advanced pistons and other mechanisms were partially exposed through the minimalist design (that plastic is expensive!) but were none the less highly effective at moving the machine quite nimbly on its eight legs.

Each of its six, spindly, elongated upper limbs carried some kind of slicing or striking device behind the gripping claws that passed for its hands, with the two hind legs being much more sturdily built, dedicated to walking only. The body was a bundle of machinery enclosed in a frame of stiff pipes that would protect the inner workings from a bad fall or other such trauma, and the head was a nondescript spheroid with a single glowing eye. In all, it was around the size of really big horse. The overall construction told Skye that it was meant to be frightening, a weapon of terror that sacrificed pure efficiency for the unbelievable advantage of striking fear into foes, much like that he was feeling right now.

To be sure, the very next thing he did was ask Vera if she could hack the thing, always hopeful that it could be as easy as that. Much as he expected, she informed him that it was hardened against data assault, not even possessing a wireless connection port that she might attempt access through. Unless he could find a way to jack her into it, she couldn't even try, and the thing wasn't exactly going to stand still and let him attach his mini-hacker computer to its hard drive.

Next he went quickly through an inventory of his mind, trying to find out what was working after the beating he'd been putting it through. His PV was still shot, that endlessly hungry pit would be busy for a while yet clearing the sheer volume of hate he'd drawn from Raven, which was typical. The thing that plagued his existence wouldn't even be there for him in a situation where he could actually use it, a mind clear of terror being much preferable to the ice water that numbed his body right now. Other than that, his options were still limited.

Even if they would have some effect on this thing, (which of course, they _wouldn't_) Skye didn't have enough telepathic juice left in his whole brain to create a microthread of concentrated thought ribbon. The thing didn't have a brain of any sort that he could influence, besides which he didn't have enough telepathic energy for that either. Honestly, considering how much damage he'd done to his mind with the extreme overreaching he pulled with the demon, he was fucking lucky he could even _move_ right now, not that it came as much of a comfort considering the way that thing was staring at him, adjusting its program for his dodging style. It left him with only one recourse, and he'd be hard pressed to use that when he couldn't even really see the thing.

Skye calmed himself without the benefit of his PV, remembering that more than just _his_ life hung in the balance here. Slowly so as not to prompt the thing to give up its self-reprogramming by transforming himself into a threat, he drew his service blaster and concentrated all his ability on detecting the thing. He'd seen that it was about twenty feet in front of him, on the very perhiperal of where his clairvoyance had any real resolution, but the same space to his senses might as well have been empty. And hey, not that convenient kind of empty that was a void, a lack of everything that would define its location by absence—that would be too easy. No, this damn thing simply wasn't there, the place it was supposed to be like any other bit of timespace in the ether, the mark of a truly ingenious design. It was so still now that it wasn't even disturbing the air, something that, along with his danger sense, was all that had allowed him to dodge it before!

Deciding there was nothing to it but to try it the hard way, he opened his eyes again, the already tender nerves jolting him with agony, but granting him a vision of its position that he held firmly in his mind after he snapped his eyes shut. Without further delay, he pointed the blaster and opened fire in one quick movement. In an instant he had five shots off, dead on into the thing's eye, hoping to fry its circuitry with the hot beams. His senses could see the beams, could detect where the ultra-hot rays had left trails of ozone as they incinerated the air in brilliant flashes, and Skye recognized the other reason it went without armor as his heart dropped out of his chest. The beams had curved around the stationary robot, the twisting spears of light defining pathways that formed a spherical shell around it. The fucking thing had and Electromagnetic Defense Field.

Skye was not a religious person, he'd seen too much of the miltiverse to put all that much stock in such things. However, right then, as the machine began to stir slowly from its adjustments, he wouldn't mind a little divine intervention from any higher beings that might be listening. As he reluctantly tasted the possible futures with his ESP, he found that pretty well his only hope of survival would be for Raven to show up and pull his keyster out of the oven, though even that might be pipe dream at this point. He'd used the snapback the second he'd finished warning her, nothing else would have done to satisfy his danger sense, but he'd surprised her, and he knew that anyone would hesitate in that situation. With the temporal distortion between here and there, it could be minutes before her soul struck her body, and this thing was coming for him _now_.

That was it for his thoughts, because a silent leap from the thing had his danger sense flaring again. He flipped back, trying his best to vary his movements and confuse the thing's expectations, but as blow after lighting-quick blow shot in, the weakness of his technique became apparent. He'd trained his body to dodge on instantaneous command of his danger sense, something that served him extraordinarily well as far as just escaping harm went. However, now that it came right down to it, his reaction to any particular attack was extremely predictable, with this implacable opponent knowing all his moves back to front after its little time-out that he'd been so powerless to cut short. So it was that it didn't take long at all.

After a series of unseen blows that Skye did his level best to be unpredictable about dodging, the thing baited him to a backflip away from a leg-slash, then followed through with a lighting-quick spear stab that he had to roll across the round to escape. BINGO! The bastard was on him like no tomorrow, a huge claw coming down while he was helpless to evade, crushing his left shoulder and breaking bones with an awful crackling sound, pinning him to the ground as he screamed in agony. With no respite, he twisted his body away from a stab on the left only for its right leg to come around and cleave a decisive spear all the way through his guts until it hit the rock underneath him with a clang. He cried out in pain, but no sound came out, the shock to his body choking off his air as the thick metal spike in his gut twisted mercilessly, grinding his intestines.

That was it, he couldn't breath, he couldn't think, his ESP was blacking out, and there was nothing left for him to do. Vera shouted into his mind, urging him to do anything at all, but even that voice became distant after a moment. His eyes bulged open, taking in the emotionless circular eye glaring down at him as even his regular vision began to fade, a final bladed claw coming down on the right for a finishing skull-crusher. The last gasp of his ESP held a mysterious sensation, but he was too far gone to recognize it for what it was—Hope.

Suddenly, the weight of the thing was lifted from his body in an agonizing jerk, his gut exploding with bloodspray as the spike was ripped free, his hand reaching reflexively to cover the hole as he gasped in air past the blood in his throat. His ESP snapped back into clarity, and he got a vision of black energy flinging something across the room before he realized that Raven had indeed come through.

In the back of his mind, he could hear Vera directing the nanomachine reconstructors to maximum efficiency, but right then he was more worried by what he saw from Raven. She was kneeling on the ground, breathing heavily after the mild exertion of tossing that thing across the strewn rubble and boulders of the disaster site. In that moment, he knew her powers were tanked too, and that they were both a hell of a long way from safe. He would never know if it was the blood loss, the intense agony, or just some messed-up desire dredged from his subconscious, but the generic aura-vision he was using to see where she knelt some thirty feet away altered autonomously to show him her soul instead, and the breathtaking sight of that dark vision eased his pain somewhat. As he took in the four gorgeous lavender eyes, he couldn't help but wish he had a little more confidence in their ability to survive this to go along with that view, the sound of shifting rubble and the squeal of only slightly damaged servos telling him there wasn't much reason for any.

Cliffhanger? Yes. Too bad, I'm too tired to write anymore now, just feel lucky I didn't cut off when Skye was fading out like I wanted to. Look forward to the next installment in a week rather than two plus, at least hopefully. How will Raven save Skye? Will she even be able to? What the hell happened to Beast Boy and Cyborg? Will Slade get away scott-free!!?? Answers to all this and more in the final part of the 'Gang Wars'/'Long Night' story arc—Dawn.


	18. GW4: The Enduring Darkness

Intro: It looks like I goofed a little bit this time. You see, I got so into writing all these new parts that I spent way too long doing it, and now it's been two weeks since my last update. On the bright side, this chapter rocks, and I've finally gotten a grip on writing the last of the characters I've been disregarding. Look forward to more movement in this plot than ever before in one place at one time, more drama than I've ever even attempted before, and a healthy serving of humor and action to wash it all down if that's not your thing. Please try to pick up on all the things I write that culminate hints from four to ten chapters back or foreshadow momentous plot twists to come, because otherwise I'd feel my efforts here were wasted. Now get in there and read, cause it's a long one.   
Chapter 18: The Enduring Darkness 

"We've got to snapback _now_!" Skye shouted at Raven over the siren, and she barely had time to comprehend what he'd said before he vanished, a glimmering silver residue the only trace of where he'd stood.

Raven didn't have time to wonder about what was going on, she didn't even have time to think about how much this was going to hurt. The instant his words registered, that was the time to act, and to her credit, for once Raven didn't hesitate in something involving Skye. By some instinct she couldn't define, she knew that she had to trust him in this, and that very thought became the trigger for the snapback. A quick check showed her tether to be firmly in place, despite the odd dynamics of the constructed world she'd entered, and the slightest pluck set the process in motion.

Like that, she was pierced with the snapback pain, a sharp, enduring agony not unlike being punched in the stomach and popped on the back of the head at the same time. Her eyes snapped open as she fell gracelessly from her meditation pose and struck the rubble below, coughing, sputtering, and gasping for air while struggling to recover her blurred senses. As the first delicious breaths of air entered her lungs, the swirling blur that was the disaster area began to enter focus. As she dragged herself to her knees, the ringing in her ears transformed into screams, and she hurried herself to her feet in response to this new impetuous.

What Raven could see then by the light of flood lamps and road flares was a tide of people fleeing in a panic from the general direction of her left. Doctors and medical personnel struggled to cart the bevy of wounded that Raven had herself pulled from the rubble not even two hours past, sometimes with the help of less injured patients, but often against the rush of panicking souls too frightened or too selfish to lend a hand to those unable to move themselves. Scattered police in their black and silver body armor, their weapons abandoned, helped move the injured as well, apparently having prioritized where their hands were most needed just then. By application of pure logic, Raven traced the line of their flight to her left, catching sight of the object of their terror.

A kind of mechanical spider, black as midnight and weighing two tons at a minimum, was standing with disturbing calm amid the remains of the building. Behind it lay a trail of smoking wreckage that could be distinguished from all the other smoking wreckage by the sporadic claw marks and blade cleavings all over the place, as though it had been leaping about jabbing spears and swords every which way. Her eyes followed the line of its simple caged-in body until they caught what it was so intently and motionlessly examining, and that was when she knew that Skye had had very good reason for his stingingly fast return to this plane.

This was the bemused comment that registered in her still-shaken mind as she watched Skye stare it down, sweat dripping down his face and over his closed eyes, his pale features set into a completely unreadable expression. She tried to walk toward him, but stumbled badly and had to catch a steel beam before her completely drained body hit the ground. It was from this leaning position that she saw Skye, who, if anything, looked way more tired than her, slowly draw his weapon from his side, as though he were trying not to call the machine's attention to the fact. As she watched, he opened his eyes with a grimace of agony tempered by steel willpower, then snapped them shut again, pointed his blaster, and fired.

Raven's eyes were dazzled by the flash of light that followed, a sphere of incandescent intensity consuming the relative darkness, and she allowed herself a sigh of relief that it was over. It was only as her eyes cleared that she realized her premature celebration was completely unwarranted, for the sphere had been an image of the beams arcing around the monster rather than hitting it! She forced her feet through one step, then another, certain that she would have to help now, even as she took in the glowing-hot spots on the rubble where the refracted laser beams had struck and wondered how the fuck she was supposed to manage that.

Her attention was drawn once more to the robot, which had not moved despite the heavy fire which had just glanced harmlessly from whatever shielded it, and to Skye, who had managed by some unknowable process (probably terror) to turn even more pale. As she staggered a bit closer to them, the robot ended its quietude with a powerful lunge, leading with the bladed fore claws. Much as she expected, Skye dodged easily, showing the same disgusting agility that he and Robin had used to face off with in the living room, and her always-neutral expression ticked with a smidgen of relief that he was in no immediate danger despite his ineffective laser weapon. She staggered closer as the battle raged on, the streak of white moving through dodges like an untouchable beam of moonlight, the unexpectedly quick heap of metal leaping and striking like a spindly-legged ball of black greased lighting.

She managed to close about half the distance to the wide-ranging area where the fight was raging before anything changed, her feet becoming surer beneath her with each step as she got used to being in her body again. She cursed the fact that she lacked the energy to fly, even as she tried to ignore the implications this held for her ability to aid Skye, doggedly putting one foot in front of the other as her eyes began to water with the attempt to follow the blurred movements of the two combatants. Suddenly, the thing took a swipe at Skye's legs that would have shortened him at the knees had he not flipped away, coming around with a spearing attack from its other front leg instantaneously and sending Skye into a full out roll across the ground that, for her life, Raven couldn't understand how he'd managed. The moment Skye hit the ground, the robot pushed off the ground with its left legs while its right legs clung down, inverting its body. It used all the momentum of its flip to drive its front claw down onto Skye's shoulder, and this time there was nowhere for him to go.

Raven's whole body twitched involuntarily as she heard the crack of his bones shattering and the accompanying scream, her mind blanking out as she watched him dodge one stab from a spear-like second leg, then become impaled by the next. As the blood flew from the spinning metal bar in his guts, the world fled momentarily from her view. Somewhere deep inside her, the Hate chuckled slyly in her box, reveling in the downfall of the one that had brought her low. To the side of that unwanted presence was the only other thing in her soul that could motivate her power to its greatest heights, that could dig deep into the wellspring of mystical energy within her to pull out her uttermost reserves. What she'd been holding back from Skye since the moment she'd lain eyes on him would no longer be ignored, and Love blossomed forth from a dark corner of her soul, bringing with it a flow of much-needed power. The same thing that always pressed her powers to their limits to defend her dear friends, the same energy that had withstood the brute's earth-cracker not two days back, now came to Skye's rescue in a strike Raven had not chosen, but which was chosen for her by the ultimate arbiter of such things: her heart.

The world snapped back into focus just in time for her to see her power catch a blow that would have split Skye's skull, a beam of black she didn't remember creating linking her glowing hand to the encompassed robot. Now that she had control again, all she could think to do was fling the thing away from the man it was still grinding into a bloody mess. Like being launched from a catapult, the semi-elastic beam of power between her and it jerked it away, accelerated it through a titanic arc, then smashed it into a building behind her so hard that a cloud of dust kicked up and a partially destroyed wall fell on it.

The same instant the beam faded was the one where the power claimed its due, and Raven collapsed again to her knees as a terrifying weakness overcame her. She'd pressed her limits a little too far and now she could barely move, much less continue to fight against the thing she heard dragging itself from the rubble behind her. Panic began to gnaw at her mind, and the only thing she could think of was to see if Skye was okay. Using the dregs of the power that blast of feeling had wrung from her soul, she visualized the space next to him, slicing through the ephemeral barriers of space to arrive there the next moment, emerging from a puddle of shadow. The effort of this small thing struck her brain like a hammer, and she lost vision as the world blurred out again to blackness.

"Skye?" she asked weakly, voice trembling more from the barely controlled terror her visual blackout had caused than anything else just then. Her vision began to come back in fits and false starts, weird blobs of light fading in and out until finally she had a complete, if blurry and somewhat multi-imaged view of the horrifying wound in Skye's gut. He had a silver-gloved hand pressed over it, and blood seeped through the mesh and soaked into his black shirt, a second gout pooling under him through the hole in his back. She was struck by a morbid desire to move his hand and see the ruined tissues below, to take in the cracked bone, the ruptured organs, and the lacerated viscera she knew lay just beneath the interposed palm. The horrific and unwanted desire passed when Skye's body stirred slightly, his head lolling to the side on the ground while blood poured from his lips.

"Raven…" he gasped out now that the mouthful of blood had cleared down his face, and she was shocked that he was able to talk at all considering how ground up his insides were.

"You shouldn't talk—" she tried to warn him to silence, her week voice a bare whisper from the magnitude of her exhaustion. She was silenced when his far hand lifted off the ground to stay her protest with an upraised palm, then dropped down to point at the gem on the glove that now held his insides in place.

"Touch… gem…" he just managed to choke before a spasm of some kind wracked his head and left it completely limp on the stone. Raven could hear the robot fighting its way out of the wall that had collapsed onto it behind her, but she was so wiped out at this point that it didn't really matter to her. She wasn't even sure how much longer she'd be conscious, so she was hardly worried about how close behind her the thing trying to kill Skye was. Freed of reservations by the bubble of undirected despair and complete exhaustion holding up her mind, she reached out a shaking hand to touch the red, blood-coated gemstone that dominated the back of his palm. There was a rush to her head, the strangest impression of darkness and emptiness, and then a presence prickling along her thoughts.

(Shift to Thought-Speed)

"Thanks for the save, though I hope you won't be offended if say that I wish you'd been a little sooner," Skye's mental voice spoke directly into her head. Raven couldn't believe it, but everything from the crystal clear mental connection to the way the now indistinct background of the world had frozen like a single movie frame argued against her. They could only have entered full communication, and now their minds were jacked together as closely as two consciousnesses could ever be.

"Skye…" she tried, but words failed to express how incredibly, lividly, mind-numbingly embarrassed she was, as her training had been rather specific about this kind of mental contact. It was the kind of thing one did with one's parents, one's children, and… well…

"Please spare me," Skye's tone took the wind out of her crushing embarrassment in a real hurry, replacing it with a kind of shock as he continued with "that view of full communication belongs in Victorian England along with prohibitions against hand-holding and blowing kisses. Whoever taught you psi must have been a real stuffy old bat. And besides that," he cut off an attempt on her part to get angry at him, something she hadn't realized she had the energy for until he'd started talking, "this isn't really a full connection, just a shadow of such that I'm creating with the amp gem. A real one involves various… 'Sensations' that I have little doubt you wouldn't appreciate right now. It wouldn't do us much good to plan a way out of this mess if you just up and kill me afterward for taking liberties like that."

Raven's answer came in the form of a storm of images and feelings that Skye was helpless to avoid now that he'd enjambed their minds into thought-speed communication. She pelted him unreservedly with indignation at everything from the way he'd insulted her and her teachers to the massive amount of nerve he had to be lecturing her in a time like this. When it had all passed, she still wasn't quite able to suppress how happy she was that he wasn't dead or acting like he was dying. That slipped through the end of her tirade despite her best efforts, and to her surprise she was met with a reserved but extremely meaningful feeling of gratitude in return. The interchange of emotion cleared the link of all the stress and misunderstanding induced rancor, and suddenly the purpose of this connection snapped back into the forefront of her mind.

"Skye, give it to me straight," she asked him, a calm seriousness in her mental tone as the gravity in her soul that was all she'd allow herself of the despair she should rightly feel began to catch up with her, "are we going to die here?" She asked because she _knew_ he'd know, he couldn't possibly not feel and comprehend the way reality was twisting around them, hinging on their actions like a drop of water that had yet to discover which way it would flow down a pane of glass. No matter how butchered his mind was, he'd know.

"Not necessarily," was his perfectly honest and completely ambiguous response, absolutely failing to satisfy Raven in a way that none the less gave her a beam of hope to hold up her sagging morale. "I've traced it all out, and it looks like there is only one course of action that includes both of us living to see tomorrow. Everything blurs off to infinity after this one event, which means all of possible fate in the local cosmos is percolating around us right now. Do you feel honored yet?"

"I feel tired," she answered without emotion. His sarcasm was not lost on her, but she honestly had little sympathy in her soul to squander on a man who was plagued with knowledge like this, especially when it was about to… _hopefully_… save their lives.

"And I have a little something up my sleeve to fix that," he came back to her flat expression of the hopelessness of their situation with an enticingly direct infusion of vitality, her mind perking at the mere suggestion of something to give her a fighting chance against that thing.

"Well, don't keep me in suspense here," she demanded calmly, the sudden improvement in her mood shifting her back into comfortably neutral and out of the uncharacteristic slump.

"As I was pouring through myself in a completely fruitless attempt to avoid being impaled, I came across a little something that may be of aid to us. I myself have no way of using it, at least none that I could commit and still live with myself afterward. You however, might just be able to make something of it."

Without further explanation, Raven was granted a vision of that place she'd visited earlier, the mirror of Skye's soul she'd delved into to tap his powers. The view rushed past everything she remembered, her passing glance showing the fantastically organized and compartmentalized space was even more impressive while active than it had been when he was absent. Even now, with his whole consciousness oriented to communicating with her, a great flow of information traveled in rivers and eddies as he processed the world around him with those wonderful senses. All that was quickly left behind, leaving Raven at the bulbous shield behind which his vampiric core still gorged on the Hate's energy. There was something different about it, and as she tried to figure out what it was, he picked up his explanation again.

"Raven, while we were off shooting the breeze on the astral plane, using astral time, my vampiric core was hard at work doing what it does best: feeding its bottomless appetite, in core dimension time, no less. At first, when I noticed the shield's size hadn't decreased after about two hours of work from the core, I thought I was just having a little trouble digesting all that demonic hate. Then I took a closer look, and as I realized what had happened, my powers lined up exactly what I had to do."

"I'm… not sure I understand," Raven answered his almost excited speech with a solidly neutral tone that represented just how far she returned from the pit of despair. With the way Skye was talking, it was difficult to remember that almost certain death was ever-so-slowly bearing down on them as their mental connection compressed their conversation into fractions of a second.

"Raven, your power and your emotions are connected a lot more closely than I ever imagined. I thought I was being careful only to drain out the Hate that powered the creature possessing your body, when in fact I got a bucket load of this at the same time," and he caused the shield to become transparent and allow them a view to the contents. Rather than the cloud of blood thirst and malice that she'd detected upon her original snoop into the energy cage, now their resided within what could only be called a sight for sore eyes. Power, her very own accursed and beloved black energy, and a whole damn lot of it. Just then, she could never remember having seen anything so beautiful, and an uncontrollable feeling of pure relief washed through her, the accompanying wash of other emotions causing the bare fumes of power left in her soul to sparkle in their explosive response.

"My psychic vampirism," Skye continued, seemingly basking in the feeling she sent down the line even as a steadying pulse of caution returned from his side, "allows me to remove any and all forms of energy from a living or spiritual entity. However, the core can only consume emotional energy, leaving any other types completely alone. Otherwise it would eventually drain my life away as well and cease to exist with my expiration, you see. The hate was eaten out of the larger mass and left behind a pristine sea of your energy in my mind. It was quite the piece of luck that I put that energy inside the shield with everything else too, considering the _fucking_ _picnic_ it would have been finding out what that stuff meshing with my spirit would have done."

"Are you done yet?" she couldn't help but snap at him after that long-ass speech, "Damnit Skye, stop running your big mouth and let me have it! There's a killer robot with your name on it knocking at the door, and this girl has a few life debts she'd like to get off her back already." Raven's neutral tone was tinged with eagerness and bravado, her confidence ballooning as she got a sense of just how much power was sitting in Skye's skull. She'd thought the mass of power the Hate had drummed up was lost to the free ether during the process of prying that bitch out of her control core, but now it looked like Skye had saved nearly every drop.

"Great, that's definitely what I wanted to hear, but just hang on and listen for a moment. I've got a feeling that even everything I've got here might not be quite enough. There are… uncertainties in the near future."

"What kind of uncertainties?" she asked reflexively, and realized what a stupid question that was only an instant before the wave of annoyance she'd drawn from Skye slapped her in the metaphysical face.

"Shit Raven, if I knew that, do you think I'd waste time giving you obscure warnings? All I know is that we're in it up to our armpits here, and this power might not be enough. Also, I'm in damn bad shape right now."

"No kidding, if you move your hand I could probably see China through that hole," Raven quipped neutrally, a kind of empty revenge for the way this reminder dampened her good mood.

"Heh, ha, heh, heh," Skye actually laughed, a real and genuine laugh with an accompanying sensation of humor through the link, and Raven almost fell off the connection in surprise. No one ever laughed at her snide remarks (except B.B. who was always rather transparently sucking up). "But all kidding aside, about the only thing I can do to help is back you up with intel. ESP doesn't do shit with this guy, he's fucking invisible, but my danger sense is still going strong—though that's about the only damn thing working in my whole skull right now. Anyway, I'm going to rig it up to your mind and try to piggyback a normal mental contact onto the end of this one, okay? I'm a little too toasted for anything more advanced."

Raven, despite all that had happened, still managed a distrust relapse, the thought of giving him that kind of access making her uncomfortable in a very familiar way. Skye could sense it immediately through the link and made the kind of sound one makes when trying to hold back a scream of frustration, only in thought form, if you can imagine that.

"Shit, Raven _please_!" he begged, and the sincerity was unimpeachable with their minds jacked together like this. "I'm bleeding to death on the ground, my mind is fucked six ways to Sunday and, oh yeah, _I've got a really big hole in me_! Please, this is all I can do, the only way I can pitch in here, and I've got a damn strong feeling its necessary, so get off that 'walled island of distrust' you've got going on and give me a fucking chance here… please?"

Raven took a very long moment to consider his words. She wanted to let him in, or at least recognized how much good sense it made, but she'd been doing this the same way for so damn long… it was just hard to let it go. Keeping her mind to herself had been tantamount in her own eyes to protecting the world from her father's influence… and in turn protecting herself from letting others know exactly what a freakish half-breed she was. Then of course, it dawned on her that a guy who, perhaps better than anyone else she'd ever known, understood just exactly what she was, still looked at her with a terrifying emotion when his senses were tuned to surface of her mixed soul. That one thought pierced her enduring distrust at last, and she acquiesced with a feeling rather than a word, unwilling to say anything more to him just then. He responded with a new wave of gratitude that touched her enforced iciness without effect, but persisted none the less.

"Once we drop out of this contact, things are going to go big time crazy, and I don't have enough power to set up another one. Is there anything else you want to ask about before the shit hits the fan?" Raven took his question as sort of peace offering after the strain of what had just gone on, and for the benefit of both of them, scraped herself back up to something like normal for her answer.

"_Where _haveyou_ been_ Skye? The shit hit the fan about _five_ _minutes_ _ago_, or didn't you notice?" The snappy, curdled-milk answer with its accompanying tone of a rancidity indifferent mood was so utterly her that _she_ actually felt better afterward, and she was forced to wonder if he'd intended that too.

"Damn Raven, I guess you're right. I must have been _holed_ _up_ somewhere at the time," and he snapped the connection before she could go off on him for the pun.

(Realtime)

Returning to the rigors of actual reality after the vacation of pure thought Skye had treated her to was quite the shock, and with her arrival, Raven felt the fatigue in her body like a pair of sandbags had just settled on her shoulders. It occurred to her that she'd been on the razor's edge of consciousness when Skye had invited her to that connection, and now that the world was back she found herself fighting off an encroaching blanket of oblivion that threatened to suck down her mind. She clawed helplessly against the advance of the dark, struggling to keep awake, but the effort was wasted, and panic began to seize at her.

"_Touch the other gem_," Skye snapped into her mind, and the words came with a wave of energy that pushed the blackness off of her mind just far enough to let her. She couldn't imagine what that small bit of energy had cost Skye's pulverized powers, and so didn't waste the aid, reaching out to touch the opposite gem with an unsteady hand.

This time she got a very different impression, a sense of warmth and completeness, as though all of everything lay within the stone, and then the power returned to her. It was spectacular, a sensation like waking up from some terrible drowsiness with a single infusion of energy that instantly permeated her entire body and mind. As her finger jerked away from the suddenly hot stone, she gazed down at her hands in stunned amazement, for she hadn't gained just some of her power back… she'd gotten it all back. Feeling like she was fresh from a good meal, some sleep, and two hours of intense meditation, she levitated herself to a low hover over Skye's body just as the Robot finished peeling itself off the wall she'd swatted it into.

"_Do you like the amp job I did on that energy Raven_?" Skye slid the thought gently into her mind, the terrible weakness of his mental tone very obvious to her, "_I owe my life to these rocks a million times over, and it looks like we both owe them this time_."

"_Do you mind? I have some garbage to recycle_," she answered, and he said no more, though the tenuous presence in her mind remained.

The robot cleared the rubble at last and started to skitter across the broken ground faster than anything its size should have been capable of. Raven barely saw the streak of black coming before it was already on her, her body flashing to the side to avoid a stab before she really knew what was going on, then jetting higher in the air to avoid a sweeping blade and a second lunging spear. By some process she neither understood nor had time to analyze, her body was dodging its strikes without her actively doing anything at all, and she supposed she had Skye to thank for the way this freed her of the need to shield and gave her the chance to counterattack this horrifically quick opponent.

Her view of the blur-fast black robot was dangerously faint, but she eventually caught her opening as she buzzed around the beast in her blackly glowing way, her own lightning quick dodges keeping her just centimeters out of reach as it tried to strike her down again and again. It was as it followed a scissoring front arm assault with a jab at the area she would have had to dodge through that she spotted it, the shield she was suddenly compelled to call into being catching the twin-spearing second legs and holding them fast as she herself flew up and over the now completely unbalanced foe for the strike. Gathering a pulse of power in her hand, she swept down to cleave the thing in half.

As she brought her hand through a sweeping chop, she formed the energy into a miniscule thread of destructive force, drawing a black arc through the air and driving for the trapped machine. The thing slipped out from within the arc with a cracking snap as the blades stuck in her shield popped off, and Raven immediately reversed the motion of the blow to sweep around the side it had retreated toward. She didn't get a good look, but again her slicing blade of power went wide, the thing seeming to twist and distort away from her attack in a ducking motion that gave it the perfect opening while she was off balance. She was compelled to shift her dimensional phase the next instant, and melted away into shadow as blades came around to gut her. When she reappeared a good distance up in the air, it was to the sight of the thing extending new spear tips on its second legs, repairing the only real damage she'd managed to inflict so far.

"_I understand that _you_ have something to do with me dodging it_," she commented into the back of her mind where Skye resided, "_but how the hell did it avoid me_?"

"_It's probably using its sensors to read the muscle movements under your skin and anticipate your attacks. I can do the same thing with ESP, and it works really just great. It all comes down to—_"

"SKYE! Fighting now—_NOT_ the time!" she cut him off with an audible shout before he could start lecturing again. It was like the guy _lived_ off of spreading around all the crap he'd packed into his freakishly tidy brain.

Armed with her newfound knowledge, Raven muttered her mantra as the thing leapt through the air at her, picking a few good sized rocks and infusing them with her spirit even as she sliced through space as a puddle of black and avoided its lunge. Emerging halfway from her pocket dimension, her head and shoulders melted up out of the ground beneath it, and she leveled her gaze at the thing while directing her projectiles to their target. The stones flew truly, but the thing turned in midair and speared them with its second legs, slamming them together and clinging its body to them. She tired to use them to crush it to the ground, but it had already pried itself free and sent itself flying at her again, forcing her to retreat or have her head spit upon its claws.

She emerged fully some twenty feet away and gathered a veritable armada of stones ranging from baseball to refrigerator in comparative size. They rose into the air all around it as she bellowed her mantra, frustration magnifying her power even as it weakened her control slightly. In a flurry, the stones shot in at it from all sides, her attack coming in earnest now that she realized just how dangerous her opponent really was. The thing was unbelievable, and began to dodge and weave through her striking stones as though it knew where each and every one was coming from before she could even throw it.

Tiny, invisibly quick motions allowed it to dodge the smaller stones while it shrugged off larger ones with blurred scuttling she couldn't anticipate. Finally, she used more power to snatch at its leg and hold it in place, only for it to begin plucking the large rocks out of the air with strong-arm blocks from its claws and impact cage, preventing any real damage while still avoiding her small stones. The next moment it pried loose from her spiritual grip and was moving too fast for her to reestablish it, and now she was on the defensive as it tried to weave through her barrage to attack her. She began to add any bit of wreckage that she could in her attempt to hold it off, the creature getting better and better at dodging her strikes as the conflict wore on. She wondered desperately in her mind what was going on, and was 'rewarded,' by an answer from the wounded one.

"_Raven, it's a ROBOT. That, as I mentioned earlier, means sensors. It can read the movements of your attacks just as easily as those of your muscles, probably with ultra-speed tachyon scanners and a positronic processor to boot, 360 degree field of vision with reflexes to put any living thing to shame. …You aren't likely to hit it like that._"

"_NOW you tell me,_" she snapped back irritably, all comradery forgotten as she began to feel the sting of his bitter sarcasm. It was particularly bad because it recalled all the times she'd done the same things to her friends, and a taste of her own medicine wasn't what she wanted just then.

Using that frustration as her focus, she dropped everything she'd been about to fling at the robot and took a deep breath, shouting her mantra as she lifted herself into the air, drawing a huge stone slab up into the air beneath her with flowing black beams from her outstretched hands. The robot seemed confused by the end of her last attack and stood still for just long enough that she managed to envelop it with energy and crush it into place, the fabulous power it fought back with making lifting the slab at the same time a spectacular burden.

"Dodge _THIS_!" she shouted, and flung the slab as hard as she could, then released her grip and let gravity do its thing. The enormous hunk of wall slammed onto the robot like a brick hitting a tarantula, and the screeching-crushing sound made the analogy particularly appropriate, especially along with the bits of leg that stuck out from under the slab on either side.

"Did I get it?" Raven asked out loud as she descended to the ground in exhaustion, gasping for air in great gulps as sweat began to roll down her face and hair in rivulets and dampen her filthy cloak. She still had plenty of spiritual power, but using it up like that was sucking down her body's strength like she couldn't believe.

She was tired enough, in fact, that a sudden explosion of sound and motion from the stone caught her forebrain completely off guard, a snap of impetuous from Skye's powers kicking up a shield she'd never have managed without him and blocking a rain of stones moving faster than bullets with a terrible sound of cracking and ricocheting. She let the shield fall just in time to look into the cloud of dust and completely loose track of the robot, a scuttling sound of its terrible speed taking it away the only indication of what happened.

"_How am I supposed to stop this thing_?" she asked herself without thinking as she choked on the dirt and tried in vain to locate the machine. It was only when he answered her rhetorical question that she realized she'd been subvocalizing.

"_Raven, you've got the power, you just have to bring it to bear on this thing. You've got to think of some way to surprise it, catch it off guard, you know. Its intelligent, but it isn't creative… it can't anticipate an attack outside of its experience_." Even as she absorbed this information, the smoke began to clear, and the robot was nowhere to be seen.

"Skye…" she began to ask, as it dawned on her just how dangerous this could be, but he didn't answer so much as pierce her mind with a spike of panic. _UP_ was the general impression, and she found herself falling backward and raising a shield before she was even entirely sure what was going on, then realized the necessity when she caught sight of the black bullet bearing down on her a split instant before it struck her shields. She charged diagonally into the air, springing out from under the shield just in time to avoid the blades that came arcing around the sides of it so hard that even the ground beneath where she'd been was sliced open. The robot didn't loose a stride, rolling off the shield and throwing itself after her then hitting the ground and springing into that skittering, super-fast run it had. In seconds, it was breathing down her neck, gaining ground even as it began to nip at her heels with the swords on its front claws.

Turning to face it as she flew backward away from it, the strikes came within range, and suddenly she was trying to dodge as she retreated. It seemed to have gotten ten times faster, so that even the blur of its movements was impossible to perceive as strike after strike rained in at her, her mind riding Skye's power and her body and powers reacting without her involvement at all. She actually became kind of detached from the whole thing as they began to travel in spectacularly fast circles around the pillar that had gutted the building, her body keeping just out of reach with quick movements to randomly dodge away from attacks she couldn't see for their speed.

The thing began to close in, and suddenly she was creating thin, bar-shaped shields all over the place, seemingly at random but apparently with quite a vital purpose, the sound of one blow after another clanging off them quite apparent. The movements were becoming indescribably quick, and Raven could feel herself tiring, even as Skye's power directed her body in the absolute minimum of defense to keep the thing away. It was as she was feeling the bite of despair then that Raven was struck by inspiration.

Zipping away from the machine, placing shield after innumerable tall, thin shield in her wake to keep it off her, she glanced over her shoulder until she saw what she wanted bearing in from the left. Willing it to be so, the defense she hadn't personally been running bore in that direction, the creature following in its single-minded attempt to remove the final obstruction keeping it from its target. She arrived at her destination, then struck out with an undirected blast of power that flung the thing back a hundred feet easy. Of course, despite the jarring manner in which its obscene forward momentum was reversed and its bulk was cast across the area, it still didn't take any significant damage, and was up again and staring at her in half a second. Good.

Exactly as she predicted, the thing closed about half the distance, then flung itself into another leap that would crush down on her with blades borne. She didn't wait, but flung up a completely opaque black shield like a dome obscuring her from view, then put her plan into action. Once again as predicted, the thing sped down with full force, probably hoping to crack her wall with the spears and trap her before she could fly out from under it. Unfortunately for it, a mere instant before impact, the shield evaporated, and it was not Raven that resided beneath it.

With a jarring thrust, a slightly bent steel beam that had been broken off to a pointed tip rocketed out of the ground like a shot from a cannon, screaming up to impale the robot in a movement no earthly eye could hope to follow. The robot probably saw it coming, but at those speeds it didn't matter, and with the sound of plastic cracking and shattering under unbearable strain, the murder machine was run through like chicken on a spit, the momentum of the blackly glowing beam sending it into a fantastic spin as the two interlocked masses twirled into the air before returning to the ground. Like a pitched sword, the beam wobbled and rolled through the air in uneven loops, then struck the ground point first with a terrible jolt and vibrated slowly to a stop. Raven held her breath as she melted out of her pocket dimension, watching with undisguised hope as the robot's legs continued to twitch and flail on the stake.

After a moment, it became apparent that it _wasn't_ going to stop, and her anticipation soured to such an extent that her sigh was only partly exhaustion when she sent her spirit into a few pieces of steel piping sticking out of the ground at her feet. It was with more than a little satisfaction that she twirled the pipes into the air around the spider, paused a long moment for personal effect, then jammed them through it one by one, piercing it in seven places before spiking the last one through its sensor array, which had avoided the steel beam by some miracle of aerodynamics. After another fitful jerk or two, the thing began to hang limply from the steel spike, a murderous arachnoid beast impaled on grimy steel, the whole grisly affair illuminated by the scattered flood lights and road flares, everything framed by the smoking wreckage of the building and the pillar embossed with the S of Slade.

As a slight wind kicked up behind her, her cloak blew forward around her, her hooded eyes sparkled with fatigue, and she sighed as she crossed her arms over her chest. She almost jumped in surprise when a cheer kicked up from across the shattered ground of the disaster area, and she turned with measured slowness to gaze upon the enormous crowd of medical personnel, police and rescue workers, the walking wounded, and simple rubbernecks that had ignored the curfew imposed by the mayor. All were cheering, sending up yell after yell in nothing less than supreme praise of her.

Whether it was for stopping the apparent threat, for rescuing them a second time in one night, or simply for providing a great show of good winning out over evil, she neither knew nor cared. The thing had not been after them, and she had not been fighting it for them, except in the most round about of senses in that she needed Skye's smarmy ass alive if there was to be any hope of saving anyone. The thing had been after Skye, and only Skye, and it was as she realized this that she allowed herself to fade from sight in a swirl of black power.

The next moment, the swirl of black reappeared next to Skye's body, and she faded back into existence right above him. Without a word, she knelt, then took a seat near him, careful to avoid the already coagulating blood spilled across the stone. She removed her filthy hood to air out her sweat-drenched locks, then cast a sidelong glance at Skye's body, seeing that it had somehow changed since last she looked at him. He no longer looked like he was in any mortal danger, but none the less he still looked like a dried-up shitstain on a bad stretch of road, so much so that she _almost_ regretted coming after him again, his presence having withdrawn from her mind around when the crowd started cheering for her. Careful not to actually touch it, she passed her palm close over the gem, sending in a thought to the mysterious realm of emptiness and cold that was currently clamped over his no longer bleeding abdomen.

"How did you like the show?" she asked neutrally out loud and into his mind at the same time, careful to project every ounce of indifference toward his opinion that she did for nearly everyone else's, only wishing she felt it as truly as she usually did.

"_Showoff_," he accused her quietly. She took the comment without expression, and, looking back at the fluid-dripping, multi-impaled, totally demolished robot she'd just taken out, she couldn't deny the fact. As though a great weight had been lifted from her, all the strain she'd felt around Skye just evaporated with this one comment, and she fell completely into the neutral, bored, but none the less amiable tone and manner she used with all her friends (when they weren't being annoying).

"Yes," she admitted freely in that classically calm voice and its mental counterpart, "I did kind of show off. You've been touting your abilities so 'modestly' the past few days that I decided I should demonstrate my ability now that I'm actually needed for something. Do you have a problem?"

"_No! No_," he hurried to qualify his comment, a kind of pleasant spring entering his mental tone at the way she'd spoken to him. "_On the contrary, I can understand perfectly, and I've got to apologize. I know I've been something of an ass the past few days, and I mean, when you mix the persona I created to cover my… disability… with a need to gain trust that borders on apocalyptically important, and you don't get an answer that leaves much room for modesty. However, I'd like to assure you that you never needed to prove anything to me._"

"What?" she demanded elaboration on this point with a gentle curiosity to match her tiredly calm tone.

"_Raven, you've frightened me quite completely since I first laid senses on you. You've got power that I can only begin to fathom with a mind to equal people several times your age and experience. With willpower that borders on unreal, you fight a daily battle against internal forces so great that I had to _shatter_ my _brain_ in the process of _weakening_ it. To a guy whose seen more of this vast reality than anyone his age should ever be subjected to, you, _and_ your friends, are some of the most potentially dangerous beings I've ever come across, engaged in warfare against evil as vicious as anything I've ever faced. Tell me why I shouldn't have respected you enormously since the instant I met you._"

"Oh… well… thanks," she managed to keep a stammer out of her voice as this armada of complements sailed into her mind. With a mild shock, she realized that the shielding between them was casual at best, and that she could feel the truth in his words along with the exhaustion permeating his consciousness. "I mean, you certainly did a good job of acting like an aloof bastard then," she managed to tack on the smart remark, feeling the humor bubble out of him in response. It was an extremely unexpected pleasure to have run across a fellow adherent of the Cynical Biting Sarcasm school of humor.

"_Yes, I can assure you that covering one's reactions comes much easier when the only time you have more emotion than the average rock is right after you've nearly killed someone from emptying them of an intensely personal spiritual commodity_." She felt a wash of amusement as his return remark, even as she clarified her earlier thought in her own mind. Had she actually thought _another_ person with her sense of humor would be a _pleasure_?

"Okay, let's ditch the self-loathing and get down to business here. Why was that machine after you?"

"_While I'm tempted to direct you to the gaping hole in my intestines that even now threatens to overcome my nerve block and send me into a shock induced coma, then let you draw your own conclusions about what it was trying to do, instead I'll simply answer you direct. I have no clue _why_ that thing wanted to kill me, but if I could get a good look at what's left, maybe lay hands on some pieces, I might get some idea. Touch clairvoyance is strong enough that it'll even affect the god forsaken stuff that thing is made out of. Of course, that'll have to wait_."

"Are you going to be okay?" she let a hint concern tinge her tone exactly as she would for any of her other friends, and once again drew surprised pleasure from Skye's wracked mind.

"_According to my internal diagnostics, I'll have thirty percent functionality back within the hour, which means I should be able to stand and talk, if not a whole hell of a lot else. After that there's really no telling how long the reconstructors will take regenerating the damage. As for my mind, I've just about finished piecing my ESP and everything back into a rudimentary working order, but it'll be _days_ before I've got my real strength back. Uh_…" and he seemed a bit embarrassed, of all things, "_thanks for asking. Err… how are you_?"

"Fine… thanks in a large part to you I suppose. How did you… you know… get me to do that? I've never moved like that before."

"_I don't have my strength, but a little temporary rewiring takes only skill. I routed my danger sense through your reflexes and transferred motor control to subconscious directive, taking out the terrible delay that intent involves. After that it was a matter of passing a few suggestions through the back of your mind to get the whole process running. I couldn't have possibly directed the defense personally because I don't have the slightest clue how to use your powers. Except for the whole 'knowing where every strike was coming from before it happened' thing, it was all you. Pretty cool huh_?"

"Right, it was definitely the only thing that saved my neck there. Thanks for… not letting me… go it alone." She felt a sting in her chest from admitting this, but when it passed she actually felt a little better. It had been one thing to borrow his powers while he was safely out of body, but letting him piggyback in her skull had been further than she'd ever _let_ anyone transgress, and doing a rewiring job on her brain, no matter how temporary, had been way more than she'd bargained for. It was still a little hard to believe she'd given someone that much trust with her mind and soul and not been betrayed. There really was a first time for everything, then.

"_Friends don't let friends face almost certain death by themselves_," he commented, having dropped his persona of overbearing pleasantness and continual arrogance for the dour, world-weary being beneath. For the time being, at least, the air between them was clear of everything, no assumed identities, no massive paranoia, no mind numbing misunderstanding, no particular need to impress or intimidate, and they were both so run down that their powers weren't even pressing the hormonal front anymore. Raven took in the moment greedily, hoping to all the beings that ruled over such things that it would not be the last time she felt this comfortable with another sentient being. The moment drew to a close when Skye made another stab a humor with, "_And besides, if you had died while protecting me, I'd have been really sad for the minute or two before that thing finished me off. I owe you big time now_."

"It was nothing," Raven muttered, some of her natural aversion to complements resurfacing without warning and prompting her to withdraw from the link somewhat, closing into her own mind before continuing. "When I actually thing about it, that wasn't nearly as bad as you made it out to be."

"_Uh, Raven, you really shouldn't_—" a flash of panic pierced the moment and shot her full of ice water through her connection to his mind. "SHIELD! Raven, on my signal!"

Instantly her mind was filled with images and a countdown that wen all the way down to the milliseconds. Careful not to let how shocked she was show in her outwardly tired and oblivious demeanor, she went through the information he sent her and prepared down to the last second. When the time came, she sprang a wedge shaped shield to their left literally the same moment a blast of red energy came charging out from that direction, parting around the shield like a tide that smelted the stone around them into bubbling slag.

"_You just _had_ to question the ESP didn't you_?" Skye muttered sarcastically into her mind. "_This was bound to happen anyway, I suppose, but crap has a tendency to wait for comments like that… or haven't you noticed? It's one of those odd rules of this reality we live in…_"

"SKYE!" Raven snapped with a gasp, her mind flashing through a spectrum of surprised emotions at the arrival of this new threat. Just when things were going good, this had to happen, and now Skye was mouthing off again. It was incomprehensible, and despair began to creep into her heart again as she felt the exhaustion hit her bones like a leaching grip of numbing cold. "I… I don't know if I can take another hit like that!" she choked out, then, "I think we might be fucked this time!"

"No… not necessarily…"

Oscillogenerator Secret Construction Site, moments ago

White sat in his plush, high-backed command chair with an incredibly unpleasant expression on his face, his fingers tapping on the armrest as he gazed at his main view screen. The sight of the kill bot he'd _personally_ designed for the _singular_ purpose of eliminating _that_ _man_ gutted and impaled upon a steel stake riddled him with indescribable fury, and it was with a shaking hand that he reached out to press the call button on his desk.

"Yes Whige?" asked the putrid blob that was Yellow when he appeared on one of the several secondary screens. He appeared unfazed by any emotion, though he could not help but know the result of the battle.

"It would appear that _I_ have won our little wager, Yellow," and the barely suppressed rage in his voice seemed to have little effect on the expressionless criminal genius he was currently trying to intimidate.

"If I mighg remind you Whige, ig was nog so much a wager as ig was a necessigy. Ghe ogher robogs have nog been given ghe progecgive coaging yeg. So—"

"I distinctly recall you saying, 'I donGG, believe GGhe oGGGer roboGGs will be necessary.' That makes this YOUR FAULT! I bet you that, even _completely_ disabled, he'd still find some way to survive an attack from just _one_ of the units! You lost the bet, and as penalty for your incompetence, you will be granted exactly ten percent less of the universe once I own it all! Now send in the other kill bots immediately! For your sake, they'd better be able to handle him without the primary unit!"

"Whige, wighoug ghe coaging, Ageng Skye mighg—"

"I don't care! Send them!"

"Bug ghey wong even sgand a chance!"

"DO IT! DON'T ARGUE WITH ME YOU _SIMPERING_ _PILE_ OF _PUKE_, I WANT HIM DEAD, _NOW_!" and White's eyes fairly bulged with indescribable hate. Yellow jiggled in agitation this time, and cut the connection without further talk. White was left alone to stew in his own vile emotions, loathing for _that_ _man_ mixing with loathing of his own violent emotions to create a putrid cocktail of nastiness.

Outside in the work area, the nearest mind-slaves began to feel the feedback, many sickening and falling to their knees as the torturous agony of White's feelings began to grind their numb brains into goo. The nearest slaves actually gripped their head and screamed helplessly as they began to bleed from their eyes, noses, and mouths, their craniums being cooked by the intense power, bathing them in indescribable pain for the few seconds they managed to survive it.

(Yellow)

Yellow was left quivering in his own incomprehensible version of anger as the line to White cut out. The calculating iciness of his alien mind simply can't be described all that accurately in terms humans would understand, but an attempt will be made here anyway. The dialog within his pulsating nerve bundle was divided among the multiple segments of his sentience, but went along something like this, speech impediment free for pure convenience.

"How dare that simian speak to me like that?" he asked himself in the core of his mind while the peripheral sub-minds toiled away at the dozens of different projects he was working on. "He will yet pay for such disrespect!"

Yellow was left to ponder in dismay the waste of the other two kill-bots, doomed to easy destruction at the hands of the vile IDP dog that so vexed White. He'd reread the black market dossier on that agent immediately after he'd been assigned to the assassination, and so while he knew why White had ordered him to invest in the exorbitantly expensive anti-psi plastic, he knew equally well that the two kill-bots without it would be as meet before such a being.

He delegated to one of his sub-minds the process of getting the orders out to the other robots and thusly commence the waste of two fabulously valuable pieces of hardware to no greater purpose than White's unreasoning hate. That done, he put his core mind to the much more interesting task of discovering the connection between White and Skye. Since the moment he'd uncovered White's assassination/distraction attempt and sabotaged it with that subtle clue that had drawn the dog here, he'd been digging through the annals of recorded galactic history to find out just what existed between the two strikingly similar quasi-Terran freaks. His success so far had been… limited.

The history of their professional enmity was quite apparent in those areas of the IDP record database he could access, the reports of their multiple encounters and battles as complete as they were organized (And why not? _His_ species was the one enslaved/hired to work the IDP database, which is also the only reason he couldn't hack it all the way.) And yet, while these described the existence of the furious feud between the two, even detailing the way Skye had won out temporarily and gotten White imprisoned, it gave no clue toward what began the hideous conflict or why exactly they hated each other so. The enigma perplexed Yellow delightfully, and it had absorbed his core consciousness for quite some time now, his subsidiary minds more than enough to engineer his duties, his personal projects, and his enormously convoluted plot against White all at once.

Thinking of White and his insufferable barking of orders drew Yellow out of his involvement in the puzzle quite completely, and he cursed the maniac's overwhelming power even as he turned away from his pet project and focused for a moment on the operations of his own plans. Unable to escape by means of physical force, for which his species had had little use since they'd force-evolved themselves out of bodies including anything other than nervous tissue, he was left hostage to the beastly creature's telepathic abilities and the brute strength of his terrorized underlings. The worst part was, the primitive was brilliant beyond reckoning for his species, and was proving to be impossible to manipulate out of his insane goals, dragging Yellow into the impossible pipe-dreams of a vicious, violent, raving lunatic.

So far Yellow had kept his plotting concealed quite efficiently. Feigning what was, for his species, exceptional stupidity, he concealed his core mind and a number of sub minds behind a screen of his lesser intelligences that White had yet to penetrate with his disinterested but thorough searches of paranoia. He perpetuated the ruse by pretending to fall for White's transparent attempt at placating them with tampered zappers, even going so far as lying to Green about them lest the nasty one discover his knowledge of it and investigate him with _all_ his power. He had a modicum of respect for the dangerously vain photosynthetic crime lord, but he knew that her plans had little chance when compared to his, so he didn't risk anything for her.

The fact was that White was a genius, possessing a pure creativity more than likely born of his extreme emotional imbalance and deeply manic nature than the superiority he claimed for his 'species of one', as he liked to brag. The robot designs and dimensional engineering theories he put forth were unparalleled in all of regular space as far as the pure science went, rivaling higher dimensional technology in a way that set the IDP way over the edge. That this was combined with a telepathic ability able to pierce military-grade mind shields with blasts of brute, unrefined mental strength is what made the creature so very frightening, of course compounded by the fact that he was completely sociopathic and utterly homicidal. Yellow still couldn't understand how Skye had managed it before (the reports got fuzzy here, barely describing a psychic vampirism element in Skye that they refrained from mentioning in the low-security files he could access), but he knew that this disgusting lower life form would be his best bet at liberation from White, and so he let the manipulations run.

It was this fact and little else that had led him to create the slight delay which had held back the plastic coating on the second two kill-bots, certainly saving the life of the currently unprepared and ill-equipped agent. He'd expected White to see the first one fail and recall the others, but the thing continued to refuse to act with any logic when it came to Skye, and now he would loose all the precious parts and labor that had went into those two for naught. Skye might even be able to trace the things back to their separate garage before the self-destruct kicked in, or otherwise extract all kinds of detrimental intelligence from them. While this suited Yellow's plans perfectly, it still stung him deeply to waste like that, and just giving up information was always painful to his secretive species. Oh well.

His core mind was distracted from these thoughts by one of his sub minds as it bumped up some issue or another for higher consideration and integration into the greater reasoning matrix. The battle between Green and the Terran Slade was going poorly for White's forces, negative life readings indicating that Green was either dead or disconnected from the ultra-bug he'd placed on her and all the others. The unjamable, quasi-infinite range, totally invisible spies had cost him a fortune, but fortunes he had aplenty, while intelligence like what they could gather was hard to come by. His connection to the others read that Blue had teleported back to base and entered a regen tank, and that Red was unconscious and his auto-recovery timer was ticking down, so those two would probably make it, not that Yellow really cared. In all, he noted once again the odd nature of this Terran species as he filed this information away and directed that sub mind in what to do in response.

He'd noticed, mostly through his observation of Skye's movements, and now again through this surprising victory from Slade, that Terrans were not equivalent as a species. Slade's victory was not totally unexpected, Yellow himself had sold the exceptional Terran villain quite an impressive amount of advanced firepower from the stocks he'd bought up for White and also those for his own secret operation. The secondary source of distraction for White was meant to keep him concentrated on Green and her end of the conspiracy, but to his surprise, it was quickly shaping up to be a potential escape route for him all by itself. He doubted that Slade would stand a chance against the horrifying power of White, but with the A-class scrambler he'd put in the Terran's hands, anything became possible.

So that end was not totally the product of this odd Terran excellence, but there were a number of much more concerning cases to consider. While most of them, the intense majority in fact, were no better than domesticated livestock in comparison with beings like Yellow's own vaulted species, or the other highly evolved specimens this universe had to offer, there were a few exceptions. White and Skye he had some ideas about, but for all his vast riches, he could not fully comprehend how beings like Slade and the posse of children Skye had fallen in with came to exist among such embarrassingly primitive stock material. He was forced to put these "Super Beings" down to the very same unusual planetary time-space dynamic that White was so fascinated by and leave it alone, unable to spare a sub-mind to churn over the question.

Once again Yellow was distracted by a sub-mind with its accompanying concern, and this one also detailed a battle he'd been supervising. One of Green's important secondary bases, assaulted by Slade in a transparent diversionary ploy that Green's failure to recognize had probably _earned_ her her defeat, was currently occupied by a pair of young Terrans from the group Skye was plotting with. One of them was trying to hack the main database from Green's peripheral access port, an enormous blunder on the part of whoever was making the attempt. It would be easy to set off the explosives in that console, if not simply to blow the whole base and _really_ ruin the night of whoever was foolish enough to tamper with it, but he decided instead to shore up that end of his manipulations.

Letting one of his inner sub-minds, those that were hidden from White, take care of organizing the leak he desired, he recalled the information he had on the two 'Teen Titans' that were currently infesting Green's base. As he went through the information, among which was their entire life stories, educational records, genetic profiles, medical histories, and genealogies back as far as this pathetic species traced such things, he decided that they would indeed be perfect vectors for yet another branch of the invisible corridor he sought to lead Skye down. The manipulations would run indeed, and he would be free.

Pier Park Base

As Cyborg stood down and away from the burning, smoking ruins of the fantastic conflict that had taken place here, he continued to study the computer console he was attempting to access. The ECM in this place was unreal, and sweat dripped down the human side of his face at the terrible risks he was running by trying to hack this thing blind. Lord knows it was common enough to booby-trap such things, and his lack of effective sensors was leaving him sadly ignorant of whether or not this was such an instance. Making the whole thing worse was Beast Boy and his unbearable pestering.

"Would you _come_ _on_?" he snapped out for about the millionth time, pausing in the hole he'd been pacing in the floor with his impatient, antsy, twitching to nag at Cyborg.

"Just _shut_ _up_, B.B. and gimme some room here," Cyborg asked, barely restraining the screaming fit the combined stresses were demanding from him. B.B. just couldn't leave it alone though.

"I can't _believe_ you man! What could _possibly_ be so important? Slade's robots and whatever they came here for destroyed each other, and this sorry excuse for a base was wasted with them! We need to go back, we lost contact with Robin and Starfire _ages_ ago!"

"I'm _warnin_ you man, just get offa my back before I do something I regret here," he squeezed through teeth clenched against shouting, the delicate work he was doing at the console suffering badly from the distraction.

"They might need our help Cy!" Beast Boy persisted unreasonably, "you said yourself that if Slade and Terra aren't here then they're probably at the other battle site! We need to get over there and find out what happened! I mean, Starfire and Robin aren't answering, what if they're hurt or something? Raven and that new guy are probably halfway back to the med-bay by now, _we_ need to get out there and check up on them!" It was probably around here that he realized the other guy really wasn't going to acknowledge him, so he forced the matter with an exasperated "…_Cyborg_!" and he ended his attempt at persuasive shouting by grabbing the arm of the cybernetic goliath so astutely ignoring him. This was a mistake.

"OKAY, _that's_ _it_!" shouted Cyborg, turning from the console to look way, way down at the much shorter guy, lifting his arm until the green one hung in midair at his side. He waved his arm through the air until Beast Boy was flung from it, then glared at the crumpled heap of green furry annoyance where he lay disoriented on the floor.

"How many times am I gonna have to explain this to you? Robin and Starfire can take care of themselves, Robin assigned us to this place, and we're not leavin until we know _what_ _the_ _hell_ _happened_ _here_! There's a _goddamn_ _WAR _raging in the streets of the city man, doesn't that even worry you a little bit? If I can hack this computer, I can find out what touched off this battle and what Slade's robots were fighting against, and right now that's just a _bit_ more important than getting yelled at by Robin for running after him when we're supposed to be here! Got it?"

His fists were crossed over his chest as his red eye glowed dangerously in the dim lighting of the wrecked computer room they'd found. The space was recessed under an old ticket booth, the unimpressive alcove most likely hidden from view under the pier inside one of the massive cement pillars that were supposedly there to support the park's weight. After their arrival, they'd stormed the place, rescuing people and putting out fires in spectacular flair, generally doing the hero thing, all without being troubled by whatever caused the destruction. Survivors they'd questioned on the way detailed a fierce battle between mysterious flying robots and the quite familiar army of Slade.

The two had found remains aplenty, enough robot parts strewn in the water and the docks to account for a frighteningly large force of the nasty things, but not a single functioning droid to be found. Of the victors, there was equally no sign, the wrecked parts of these never large enough even to get a good idea of what they looked like. It was while looking once more for any sign of survivors or antagonists that they came across the hidden room, and Cyborg had been at this console for a good half hour since then.

"Give me a BREAK!" Beast Boy shouted fearlessly as he peeled himself off the floor, "this place isn't _going_ anywhere, so why the _hell_ are we wasting our time here when we could be out helping the others?! We need to go to them! They might be hurt—Terra might be--!" but Cyborg cut him off with a huge step forward that clanged against the metal floor and actually bounced the lighter man up off of it with the reverb.

"I knew it!" he snapped as he looked down at what had once more become a heap of green fuzz, "this isn't about the others, it's not even about getting back at Slade! You've been whining my ear off for the past forty minutes because you wanna see your girlfriend again! I can't _believe_ you man!" and the utter contempt in Cyborg's voice pierced the younger guy's heart.

He couldn't hold it back any longer, and tears began to flow freely from his eyes, the sudden wracking sob that burst from his lungs freezing Cyborg in his mental tracks and leaving him completely speechless. For a long moment, he stood in stunned silence as the little guy let it out, unable to recall the last time he'd been as confused and uncomfortable as right now. Eventually, Beast Boy began to belt out his woes in poorly articulated bursts of misery between gasps.

"Cyborg… you just don't understand… she wasn't my girlfriend… she wasn't my _anything_… there wasn't time!" He paused for a long wracking series of sobs after this, but finally managed to go on with, "Slade… Slade he… he stole her away before I could tell her how I felt." And now his voice grew quiet as the sobs slowed to a miserable muttering.

"I didn't know what was going on… I'd never felt like that about anyone before… and then when she betrayed us… I thought I'd loose it! She seemed so cold, so damn evil… but I always knew it was just _him_, using her like he uses everyone and everything. _Fuck_! How could we have failed like that?! How can we ever do enough to make up for leaving her to him?"

"B.B…." Cyborg tired to articulate some kind of answer, despite the clearly rhetorical nature of the little guy's heartbroken musings, but felt his voice fail in the face of the emotion pouring out before him.

"God… when we thought she was stone… when we thought she was gone for good… I can't even describe it. It was like someone had torn out my heart and put it on a metal spike, I… I… it was just…" he was at a loss for words.

"You _were_ pretty inconsolable," Cyborg supplied for him quietly as he sat down next to the green one with a loud clang, leaning back against one of the small room's nondescript walls. Beast Boy nodded, then continued.

"I was so messed up inside, I just couldn't let her go. I lived every day with the weird feeling that she would be back again, that she would just up and appear, and that I had to be ready at any moment so I wouldn't miss my opportunity to tell her… to tell her how I felt, how I _Feel_. I wasted so much time with cowardice and indecision… worrying uselessly how she might feel about me… that it was just too late when I finally made up my mind." Beast Boy paused, taking long deep breaths as all the pain and misery was fought back by grim determination.

"Never again Cy… do you understand? I've got to get her back, I've got to see her again so I can know once and for all what this feeling is that's been _torturing_ me all this time." Beast Boy's voice trailed off, and he sat in quiet misery next to his huge friend as the two of them shared a moment of silence. Cyborg felt like a complete ass-monkey for yelling at him the way he had, and gathered his strength to talk it out now, to do what he could to help his best friend with a problem they'd all been ignoring heartlessly for fear of its extreme depth. He hadn't really considered Beast Boy capable of such appallingly serious emotional strife, and this was they price his friend had paid for that ignorance.

"I guess we all knew you took loosin her hardest of all—we would have been _blind_ not to notice. But man, you've got to understand, we were all torn up about it, none of us really wanted to admit we'd never see her again, and so we kept our mouths shut, we pretended she'd never existed, as though that could erase the pain. When you finally came out of that funk you were in, we all kinda had one big sigh of relief, and we moved on too. I never realized how bad you had it for her, otherwise I woulda at least talked to you about it, but you really looked better, and no one wanted to wreck it by bringing it up again. Sorry man."

"I can't really blame you guys," he forgave easily, still wallowing in his own misery, "I pressed the whole thing out of my mind because I just couldn't take it anymore. I sort of tricked myself into believing I was over it all, you know, for my own protection. I can't believe how stupid I was."

"You really did seem over it," Cyborg continued to talk with him, trying his best to find a subject that would get him out of this mood before he broke the good news to him. "I mean, you were joking, laughing, arguing, and choking down tofu like it had never happened, and with the way you were hitting it off with Raven and all—"

"_What_? Raven?" Beast Boy asked, perking out of his gloom in pure surprise at how the conversation had just turned.

"Uh… Yeah man." Cyborg was glad to have him out of the pits, but uncomprehending the look he was getting now was creeping him out a little. "Don't you think we all noticed the sparks between you two? When that Malchior guy showed up you turned about ten shades of green deeper than usual, then that whole Adonis fiasco kind of wrapped it up. You mean to tell me that you _don't_ have a thing for Raven?" and he couldn't keep the incredulity out of his voice.

"Well… damn…" he seemed at a loss for words now that he was actually confronted about this, turning an odd pink color under the fur on his face, "I don't… I mean I can't really…"

"Just spit it out man!" Cyborg demanded, sounding way more annoyed than the subject really warranted, a fact that would come up again momentarily.

"I guess I'd be lying if I said I didn't kind of have the hots for Raven…" B.B. admitted, his blush deepening, but he rushed to qualify the comment, "really though, she's cute, she's smart, she's got a great smile, what's not to be attracted to?"

"Why do I feel a 'but,' coming on here?" Cyborg asked colloquially, urging the younger man along now that they'd fallen so deeply into guy-talk that he'd left his problems behind.

"_But_," and Beast Boy grinned now at his metallic buddy, woes temporarily forgotten, "I can't really say if there's anything _real_ between us. I owe her a bundle for the way she helped me cope after Terra… went missing, and I felt really close to her after that. When she discovered that lying piece of shit Malchior, I just couldn't stand the fact that she had someone to make her happy while I was secretly still ten kinds of screwed over about Terra. In other words, I guess the green you noticed was envy, rather than jealousy… for the _most_ _part_ anyway. Then when that soured on her, I felt like crap again for being so envious, and so I tried to help her cope the same way she helped me. Later on, when I got those chemicals all over me, I don't know, I kinda went all crazy. I saw she was in danger and just lost it all over the place trying to protect her."

"Was it cause of what I felt for her? Would I have done it for any of us? I don't know. My feelings have been so scrambled these past few months… I just _really_ don't know. But, Cy, the bottom line is not 'how do I feel about her,' though, it's way more, 'how does she feel about me?'" And really, who the hell knows what she feels about _anyone_?"

"So you're sayin you haven't really been tryin to catch her eye?" Cyborg asked, an almost hopeful note in his voice that finally let Beast Boy in on what was going down here.

"No, not really anyway. _Definitely_ 'No' until I figure out this whole thing with Terra. And now… I wonder why you don't exactly look heartbroken that I said that?" His question caught Cyborg off guard, and it was the big guy's turn to blush all down the human side of his face.

"Hell man, did you know that girl can construct a complete two, four, or _six_ wheel drive train from memory, knows more about mass stabilization and energy conversion ratios than I do, _and_ she borrows my Sport Compact Car magazines when I'm done with them? What guy wouldn't fall for a girl like that? If not for the way you two were goin at it, and the fact that she just keeps herself so damn distant, I woulda asked her out ages ago."

"Are you still going to try?" asked Beast Boy doubtfully, but with a huge grin, thinking he could probably sell tapes of the scene _that_ was likely to be on the Internet for big bucks. He almost laughed out loud at the incredibly amusing image he got in his head, wondering idly how long it would take to find all of the big guy's pieces afterward.

"Uh… to tell the truth," Cyborg answered sheepishly, "I've kinda moved on. Raven's just too untouchable, way outside anything I'm willing to stick my nose into. I'll always love being around her, and we've got tons of customization on the T-car ahead of us that I can look forward too—she even thinks she could cast _enchantments_ on my baby—but for anything more serious, my eyes have _definitely_ been drawn elsewhere." He raised his voice as though thinking of something very pleasant, and Beast Boy immediately knew what he was talking about.

"Ha! I knew you were crushing on Bumble Bee, you were practically drooling the last time she called!" Beast Boy taunted, loving the way the huge guy blushed, then transformed his embarrassment into pride with a big smile.

"And why not? She's a total FOX man, and I'm not even kiddin. And that left hook, mmm my god, love at first black eye—if you know what I mean," and he held his jaw as though remembering the time she leveled him. The goofy grin on his face was not particularly consistent with people remembering fights they technically _lost_, and Beast Boy shook his head in submission to the fact that his big friend was just _weird_.

"Whatever you say man, whatever you say," and he trailed off as his mind turned to something else, something that he hadn't really considered before, but which could be important. "What do think about that new guy, Skye?"

"Whadda you mean?" Cyborg asked, getting something of an idea right away despite his question.

"Come on man, no two people can instantly hate each other as much as he and Raven seemed to and _not_ be hugetime digging one another. I'm willing to call something right there man, I'd even put money on it!"

"Well, I suppose _anything_ is possible," Cyborg admitted, gaining something of a frown at the thought of Raven _dating_. "Raven has somethin about her, probably that whole dark mystique thing, which makes it pretty well impossible to _not_ feel attracted to her at some point or another. I'd be willing to bet that even Robin, before he got so tightly wound around Starfire that it would take a strategic nuclear weapon to pop him out, probably had somethin of the hots for her. This new guy is probably feelin that same _bite_."

"You can say _that_ again. Before I realized she was carting around more emotional baggage than an _army_ of freshly dumped sophomores, I was _totally_ working up to asking her out. It was just her habit of _shouting_ her _head_ _off_ at me every time I started to have a little fun anywhere _near_ her that slowed me down."

"Well B.B., you _do_ have a nasty little habit of … BEING AN_ ANNOYING JACKOFF_!" Cyborg shouted, slamming his fist into the metal floor for emphasis.

"HEY!" Beast Boy gave him a dirty look, even as the impact with the floor bounced him off of it slightly again.

"But… you do bring to mind a good point. Raven isn't exactly a 'social butterfly.'" Cyborg commented with a look of consideration on his steel-plated visage.

"Yeah, more like an 'antisocial time bomb with a short fuse'," Beast Boy said with a dour look on his face as he recalled the plethora of times his purely innocent antics had been interrupted by her terrifying outbursts.

"What I _mean_ is," and Cyborg flicked the little guy on the head for badmouthing their friend, receiving a yelp of pain and a second dirty look for his trouble, "I don't see her _ever_ getting close to _anybody_, no matter if she liked 'em or what. She tried that with that dragon thing and look what happened man, people just don't '_get_ _over_' stuff like that, as you demonstrated with that little tearfest."

"Dude—that wasn't what it looked like!" Beast Boy panicked slightly as he realized what he done a moment ago, "I just had something in my eye is all. That's right… I must be allergic to something down here!" and his hopeful smile combined with the cold sweat he spontaneously broke out in to prove that he really was terrible at lying.

"Mmmhmmm," Cyborg hummed his skepticism, and Beast Boy's face fell like a bad soufflé. He crumpled in on himself, becoming quiet for so long that Cyborg thought he might have gone a little too far with his teasing. Just as he was about to up and apologize though, the little guy began to talk in a quiet, distant voice that Cyborg rarely heard from him.

"All I know is… if they do get together (he says, so totally _not_ sure how he feels about the idea)… he'd better not break her heart. …I don't know if I could watch that happen to her again." Beast Boy's voice grew particularly low and slow as he made that particular promise, the ground this assertion was based on being far safer in his mind than the really jumbled Raven/Terra thing going on with him just then.

"Amen to that!" Cyborg agreed readily, his robotic eye gleaming in the dimly lit room, "for his sake, he'd better do right by her. I'll tell you what man, if something does go wrong, I'll break his legs, you can break his arms, and I don't even wanna _know_ where Robin and Star would hit him."

"Ha, ha… right man," he seemed to revive slightly at the thought, "Oh… hey… speaking of those two, how's the pot looking?" Beast Boy at this point was just letting his mouth run, enjoying the distraction from the emotional turmoil in the back of his head so much that any subject was game to keep him off the ache that was even now creeping back into his heart.

"Huh? Oh right, the 'when will they finally get together' pot. Well let's just take a little look-see, shall we?" he said cheerfully as he lifted his arm and turned on his data-readout there. He'd usually just read it off the HUD on his cybernetic eye, but instead, he displayed it on a hologram in the air for the green guy's benefit.

"Looks like the stakes have raised!" he exclaimed in surprise as he got a look at the data, "Raven placed a bet… two hours ago? Wow, she really upped the ante too."

"What date did she put it on?" Beast Boy asked curiously as he let his head loll back onto the wall, staving off the pain with deep breaths and a feigned interest in Cyborg's words.

"You know her man, she's keeping it secret so we don't change our bets to match. She _always_ wins these things, so I dunno _why_ we even try to compete anymore."

"Your bet is still… where?" Beast Boy asked, keeping the fire of conversation stoked.

"February 14, man, definitely. If Robin doesn't put it all together by then, I'm givin up on his clueless ass."

"Heh… mine's on Starfire's birthday," he said in a cheerful bragging voice, and Cy could feel one of the little guy's rants coming on. "I'm pretty sure Robin's been searching for _alien_ _merchants_ on the _Internet_ so he could buy her something special from her homeworld. I figure he's planning on using it as an icebreaker for asking her out." Beast Boy was properly smug as he let Cy in on his 'inside information,' distancing the pain a little bit as he basked in that wash of satisfaction. The other guy just shook his head in disappointment at B.B.'s misplaced hope, almost certain that Raven had found out some actually substantive information to change her bet on.

"Alright man, we've cleared that up pretty well now, it's time to get back to work." Cyborg ended the conversation on that note and pulled himself to his feet. Beast Boy looked disappointed, the end of their chat brining his mind back to the terrible anxiety in his soul.

"Fine… just try and hurry with that thing would ya? The others might _really_ be in trouble," Beast Boy refused to completely give up his argument, even though he had a much better handle on what had been driving him, and in turn Cyborg, right up the wall.

"Oh, I don't know man, I think it might be time to check on them all _right_ _now_. I'll bet they've already got Terra in their hands, so it'd be a shame to hold off on linkin up with them any longer. I can come back and work on this tomorrow or sumpthin, it's no big deal." Cyborg had a little bit of trouble talking past the smile he wore, his heart warming with the way the younger guy's face lifted.

"YES!" he shouted, leaping to his feet. He was so hyped, he took a random jab at the wall, punching it solidly in exhilaration. Instantly the spot he hit lit up in a large square area, lines of light escaping from that square in every direction to trace all over the walls and floor. The two stood in stunned silence as a mechanical whirring sound struck up in the background, just before a lighting-quick hatch slammed shut over the hole in the ceiling and a siren went off, lighting the room with red strobes.

"Oh crap…" commented Beast Boy, never having moved from the punching stance he held, his fist still pressing the spot.

"_Damnit_ B.B.!" exclaimed Cyborg, but that was when the floor fell out from under them.

Former Site of Green Construction

"Teleport us both… here!" Skye slipped in the thought along with an image of a hidden place a little ways down on the wrecked area they'd been battling across, and Raven didn't argue. Skye could tell she was tired, but none the less they slid smoothly across space, instantly appearing behind their antagonists just before another pair of beams could burn in and eradicate the spot they'd occupied a moment ago.

Now that he'd traced their fire back to their location, he'd planted Raven and himself under some cover _very_ near them and got to work. He didn't know what the hell problem these things had with him, but these two weren't invisible to his powers, and he'd make them regret coming after him like this. Anyway, immediately after they phased back into reality, safely concealed in the alcove he'd led her to, Raven keeled over next to him and began to breath heavily, more than a little spent. He left her to rest as he slipped gently OOB and used the small amount of power he'd managed to horde to engage his ESP from his free mind (which wasn't nearly as easy as using it from within the shell of the body).

Immediately he gained a view to the two robots that had most recently accosted them. They had a very similar construction to their previous assailant, with six forward legs that could be used for walking or attacking and two hind legs designed for walking only. The major differences were that these two had a hard metallic sheen rather than the obsidian black coating, they were about half as large, and instead of the head mounted forward like some kind of spider, their main bodies had enormous beam weapon barrels sticking out the front with the heads on top of the main body. The heads were currently spinning rapidly, trying to reacquire the two of them after their sudden disappearance, the two machines unable to confirm their destruction from the fumes left in the spot they'd vanished from. Skye was certain the things would find them if given enough time, and so he had another very good reason to hurry.

"_Raven, I know you're tired… I am too, but this should be very easy_," he explained to her as he struggled to maintain the use of his powers while OOB, the infinitely simple task requiring a Herculean effort in his state of exhaustion. He received an agreeable pulse of thought back from her, and so slid filtered versions of what he was getting on his ESP into her mind. Inherent in these was a perfect view into the interior of the killer machines currently searching for them, and he sent her the next stream of thought as soon as he had himself finished running through what all was inside the mechanical beasts.

"_These conduits…_" he began, changing the view he was sending her until it focused on the thick wires near their internal power sources, "_Use your powers to break these and we're home free_."

"_I… don't know if I can…_" she pulsed back to his free-floating mind, carrying with it a feeling of deep, bone tired exhaustion. Skye realized with a sinking feeling that his power input had recharged her spiritual energy without vamping up her mental preparedness and physical endurance. She still had power to spare, but the way his modifications to her reflexes had taxed her body was now taking its toll, and she could barely stay awake for the extent to which she'd pressed her limits. His own ability to maintain the image was fading rapidly, and with a buzz of confirmation, the two robots discovered their hiding place.

"_Come on Raven, just this one last thing,_" he hurried into her mind as the robots turned and began to charge their weapons. He could sense the capacitors building the enormous charge necessary, and he knew that this would be their last chance right here, so he put everything he had left into a pulse at Raven's mind.

With little finesse or subtlety, he cobbled together an image of them both burning to ashes under the incinerating heat of the beams the two robots were about to fire, along with full accompanying sound and smell, then beamed it into her head. With a sudden jerk and a cringe of horror, she snapped her head off the ground, gasped deeply twice, then pressed a wave of her energy into the stone from her hands where she lay on top of them. The carpet of black traveled the small distance between them and the Robots, passing right through their cover, almost instantly touching the legs of the things where they gripped the ground as the robots aimed. The black wave traveled through the machines in a flash, and Skye channeled the vision of the energy coating their insides into her mind so she'd know when she had the right parts in her power.

Instants before the beams could fire, she snapped the conduits apart, the twin murder-bots crumpling in on themselves as they lost all power in that one small movement. Their limp bodies began to fry and melt down slightly as all the charged up energy heating their collection units was suddenly in place without any coolant fields, and in moments the two things were slag heaps to match the plethora of wrecked junk in the clearing under the S marked pillar.

Raven took the opportunity to collapse, muttering her opinion of his motivational tactics along with something about Skye's ancestry that he didn't care to listen too closely to as she faded into a deep sleep on the ground. The last of Skye's power also faded, and he was left alone, a floating mind in the sea of nothingness that the world was without any ESP to illuminate it for his free consciousness. Slowly, he willed himself back to his corporeal shell, his mind falling feather-gentle back into its home as he sighed in satisfied exhaustion. Man it was great to still be alive after something like that.

Of course, now that he thought about it, he was immobilized by his injury for at least another fifty-five minutes minimum (he didn't relish the thought of moving even then), and Raven was out like a light. They were currently hidden quite completely under a dome of wrecked junk that he wasn't sure he could personally move, even in perfect health. That meant they were trapped for the duration. …Damn.

As Skye kicked back in his own mind to consider what he should do with the boatload of free time he and Raven had bought with that gallon of blood, sweat, and tears, it was Vera who rained on his parade. She took a break from monitoring her ride's health to remind him that he had responsibilities, and that time, no matter what it seemed like, was of the essence. He was the one muttering curses as he instantly dropped all thoughts of recreation and turned to the task he knew he should already have completed. An inaudible moan of exhaustion marked the moment he reinitialized the one power that he knew so well, he could still use it when everything else was wrung out of him.

Under his current… 'ideal' circumstances (it was really weird thinking of his current 'in a potential deathtrap' situation as 'ideal' for anything—but it _was_), it didn't matter that he couldn't have projected a thought through the air if his life depended on it, or that his mind shield was a complete flat line, because his ESP would still answer to his beckon. Right now, in the pitch black of the hidey-hole, with no particular stress or distraction, with no local ambient psychic disturbance besides the background of tragedy and what had slipped past Raven's shield during her fantastically impressive episode of heroism, there was nothing at all to make it an effort. It was not unlike breathing to him as he let the world come back into focus.

Now that he had the time, he worked his mind around the power until he'd gotten it back into working order. Earlier, he'd had to wing it, and the energy he'd used had tapped him out, so now he had to make adjustments for this fact. He didn't have enough energy for more than a rudimentary clairvoyant idea of what was around him, and his spirit senses were rather shot through, so he dropped everything out of the latter and stuck it in the former. He was left with just enough range and resolution to see the remains of the two things that had tried to bake him.

As he poured through what was left, he began to create a composite in his own mind, memorizing each piece and part before adding it the mental blueprint. Though it was all badly melted, he soon recognized that almost all of the pieces and parts were of extraterrestrial origin. He then knew that the pack of killers he was after were no longer in the dark about his presence, which certainly made _his_ night. He'd kind of figured that the oddly executed but inherently professional assassination attempt had been their doing, but the implications for how that meant the rest of his investigation would go had kept him from admitting it to himself until just now. What intrigued him more by far was the fact that that first robot had _had_ _his_ _name_ _on_ _it_, tailored specifically to take him out as surely as any of the really well done assassination attempts he'd weathered had been. That meant that, whomever else their posse included besides the blue-eyed bruiser, at least one of them had intimate knowledge of him, more than could be bought on the black market by far. He went through the short list of people that qualified with a growing sense of dread.

As his heart began to freeze up in his chest, he cast his senses into the machines once more, contracting his field of view until he reached microscopic levels. He began to search, his mind numbing over slightly as he entered that particular state of mind, the one where you frantically attempt to find something you are terrified of actually discovering. Quickly he located spots where the micro serial etchings had been expertly removed, but he continued to frantically pour through the machines. Finally, just when he was about to let himself breathe a sigh of relief, he _found_ what he _hadn't_ wanted to find, and a potpourri of emotions erupted within him.

It was kind of hard to believe that a simple micro-etching of a large bird with outstretched wings, not unlike the eagle on a quarter, could arouse such a reaction from one person. He would never fail to recognize _that_ insignia, belonging to _that_ man, and emotions ranging from the purest terror to the fiercest hate bloomed uncontrollably in his soul. For a long moment, he could do nothing but ride the wave of feelings, confusion and anger bubbling into the mix when he was finally able to wonder how the hell this had come about.

He'd put _that_ guy away. He had wanted to kill _that_ guy rather than run the risk that he would ever have another chance to achieve his twisted ambition, and more importantly, as payback for what _that_ guy had stolen from him. The IDP had stepped in and stopped him forcibly, stealing _that_ guy away so his power could be forcibly applied to the desires of the CW much as Skye's were. He'd _known_, he'd known it _all_.

In a way, he'd known from the moment that cutthroat had made a stab at him in slipspace that this was somehow related to _that_ guy, they'd always had a connection like that, after all. He'd known that the IDP's holding facilities would be insufficient, he'd known that they'd never be able to get _that_ guy to do anything he didn't personally decide to do, and he'd known that this would come back to bite him in the ass. That it had, as all his premonitions tended to, come true, was just another stinging slap in the face.

The feelings faded slowly (his PV was still gorged), and knowledge of _that_ guy's presence settled into his mind like the start of a migraine, the terrible weight of what that would mean for everyone around him gaining presence in his long list of deep concerns. As this happened, without warning, his power went crazy.

The ether of existence to which his very soul was attuned was shifting on a massive scale, the wracking vibrations and warping structures of the possible striking his reduced senses like someone had placed a huge bell on his head and started hitting a hammer. He would later dread to think what it would have felt like with his full strength senses active, but at the time he was a shade too deep in torturous agony of the extra senses to think to carefully about it.

With a psychic 'sound' like a thousand fingernails scraping across an enormous chalkboard inside Skye's head, the incomprehensibly enormous and ever infinitely branching tree of the possible and the potential was shifting at its base, the Now, twisting and crackling upon its infinitely complicated roots, the Past, and redefining all that it represented, the Future. This is a disgusting simplification, of course, because there are infinite 'Nows' from which infinite branching paths extend to form infinite trees of the 'Future,' all twisting and overlapping through reality to form intermeshings of cause and effect so complicated that even ultra-sensitives like Skye, at the very pinnacle of their perceptive abilities, could only _hope_ to comprehend the closest and most momentously likely of events in terms of rough probabilities. In any case, the fabric of reality turned on its axis, and Skye, able to detect the chaos this entails, suffered in the process.

His body shook with spasm after spasm, the motion lancing through his puréed insides and threatening to overcome his nerve block with the resultant flare of debilitating pain. His almost epileptic episode wracked motion out of his body he hadn't though himself yet capable of, and a flailing leg scraped along Raven's back, shocking him sharply, but making no apparent impact on the dead-asleep woman. His head pounded with a pain that threatened to twist his mind out of shape and leave it as a piece of modern art-esq. sculpture, and everything he had shook at least slightly as he felt the modulation of the ether down to the smallest cell in his body.

Finally he was left in peace, the new set of reality slamming into a place with a finality as real as any Skye had ever felt. He continued to shake uncontrollably for quite a little while as all thought of rest was driven from his mind by what had just happened.

"_Fuck… Fuck… Fuck…_" he repeated within his mind as he struggled to get a hold on the flood of entirely new and unexpected potentialities that accosted his danger sense, his long-trained mind rushing to evaluate them and prioritize them as best he could considering their unprecedented volume. The winds of fate had just shifted, and he knew already, with a heart sinking faster than a week-old pop music hit on the request charts, that there was _still_ _more_ to overcome before this night was through. And he could barely keep his senses open.

Peer Park Base—Underground

Cyborg shifted where he lay, peeling himself off the hard floor to sit up slightly. As he got his processor back online after that sudden impact with the ground, the hatch slammed shut depressingly far above him, and he was left in complete darkness. His eye automatically switched from regular video to light amplification, and by the dim glow of his own circuitry, he could make out innumerable indistinct shapes out in the darkness.

"B.B.?" he asked quietly, unable to find the guy, even when he switched to thermal scan the next moment.

"MMMPH!" came the muffled sound from underneath him, and suddenly he knew where Beast Boy was. He shifted his rear a few feet to the side and was rewarded by a sudden gasp for air in the dark.

"DUDE! You just totally SAT on me man!" he shouted, like just declaring the obvious would somehow exact some remorse from Cyborg, who was now having trouble keeping a straight face.

"Sorry man, you know: don't got any sense of touch on the cybernetic parts," he said through a smile that Beast Boy couldn't see in the blackness. "But seriously, you know where we are now?"

"How should I know? You're the one with all the fancy, high tech watchamadoodles!" he snapped back irritably as he got out from under the big man.

"I already told you, the scanners don't work against whatever they've got jammin me down here!" he snapped right back, then, "and hey, I don't need that tone from the knucklehead who got us trapped down here in the first place!"

"Give me a break! How was _I_ supposed to know the wall was booby-trapped?" and the righteous indignation in his voice was classic. Cyborg could see him standing up on thermal view, and the little guy's sudden move to the right send him sprawling back to the ground after a loud clang and quick trip over Cyborg's leg.

"Would you watch it? You're gonna scratch my finish!" Cyborg complained loudly in the darkness and he shifted his leg to stand just in time for B.B. to trip over it _again_, this time with an amusing plopping sound as he hit butt first.

"_Ouch_! Hey, why don't _you_ watch it? You can buff out a ding in _your_ body but I have to _heal_ my injuries! What am I supposed to say to the ladies if I break a leg tripping over your rusty butt?!" and it was clear that Beast Boy had fallen squarely and thoughtlessly into his competitive streak. Cyborg, having no desire to drag this out, went straight for the kill.

"Would you shut it already man? You _know_ the only girl who even _almost_ gave you the time of day _isn't_ _exactly_ in any state to worry about damage to your 'perfect bod' that big bad Cy causes down in this musty secret basement!" and he said it with just the right amount of contemptuous sarcasm that it hit as a powerful jibe rather than a deadly insult. It was actually kind of funny watching the little guy's thermal signature flare into the yellows and oranges as he blushed.

"Yeah… well…" he struggled in the dark for a comeback, "why don't you give me a hand getting out of here and I can try to, oh, I don't know, _save her_ or something?!"

"What do you suggest I do man? Put a _doorknob_ under my pillow and wait for a visit from the 'magical exit fairy'? I don't know how to get out of here!"

"Dude??" he asked, as though unable to understand something, then he came back with a voice empowered by victory, "you could _start_ by TURNING ON THAT _LAMP_ IN YOUR _SHOULDER_!!!"

"Uhh… oh yeah," Cyborg stepped back in shock, then nearly kicked himself (something you could actually manage with detachable legs) for his thoughtlessness. He'd been so absorbed by bickering with Beast Boy that he'd forgotten all about that particular option, even with the tool-tip reminder on his HUD suggesting that he engage it. Without further ado, he activated the lamp, lighting up the area with a huge beam from his shoulder. Instantly he was almost blinded by the change, the light seeming to come right back to hit him in the eye. When he was able to see, he was forced to catch his breath in shock, because there was a very readily apparent reason for the reflections.

They were completely surrounded by hundreds of identical robots, every one of which was currently staring at _them_. The room was enormous and circular, and numberless expanding rings of the robots currently centered directly about the small space they'd been stumbling around in. The reflections that had so stabbed his eye came from the literally innumerable snub-nosed blaster cannons and serrated blades currently arrayed about them and hemming them in like a garden of gleaming murder implements.

"O-Okay… y-you can turn it off now," Beast Boy managed to squeak out with a trembling voice, "I think... heh eheh…" a nervous laugh slipped out without warning, "… I liked it better in the dark."

"No… wait…" Cyborg slapped B.B. away as the spazz actually jumped up on his shoulder and started jamming down on the panel his flashlight extended from. As he went sprawling to the floor, he nearly ran face first into one of the robots, and he went crawling away backward at high speed until he smacked into Cyborg's legs.

"Just chill out wouldja?" demanded Cyborg harshly then, "they're _not_ active right now, they _can't_ hurt ya, so _stop_ cowering all over ma paint job."

Beast Boy took the jibe with grace, his whole face freezing in the mask of panic he'd had, then distorting quickly into a fixed smile as he slunk smoothly to his feet, brushing dirt from his arms. "I _knew_ they weren't on," he said impudently as he crossed his arms.

"Yeah whatever, just follow me. I think I see something over there," Cyborg was looking over the tops of the rows upon rows of machines to one of the walls, not bothering to dignify Beast Boy with skepticism of his transparent boasting. He began to pick his way carefully between the robots, and Beast Boy followed, getting a better look at one of them as Cy's light swung from side to side.

The immediate impression was one of general pointyness and overall blastyness to an extreme degree. Once one got past all the weaponry (no small feat), the design came down to a uniform disk about five feet in diameter with circular eye sensors on both the top and bottom. The blasters extended on twin-linked turrets from either end of both the upper and lower sides, so that all four would be able to turn and track independently in 360 degrees and those on the same side would be able to work together. The edges of the disks were completely coated in serrated blades, giving the distinct image of a buzz saw to the imaginative mind. As he passed between two of them in his effort to catch up with Cyborg, Beast Boy caught a closer look at the three-inch saw-teeth coming out of the edge, specifically because it looked like there was an area on the edge of the disk where blades should be but weren't, as though they'd been removed… or launched off. He couldn't resist, and in a moment he was reaching out to—

"_Don't_ _TOUCH_ _that_!" snapped Cyborg, and Beast Boy snatched his hand back while turning with a jerk only to find that the big guy had never faltered from picking his way between the huge circular weapons platforms, and had called him out without looking back.

"I _thought_ you said your sensors weren't _working_?" Beast Boy complained as he hurried to catch up, ever careful not to slice himself open on the long blades.

"I don't need _sensors_ to know what _you_ were about to do. How about _this_ time, _instead_ of messin with stuff and accidentally wakin up all these killing machines, you just _keep_ you _hands_ to _yourself_, and _follow_ _me_?" Cyborg asked sarcastically, his voice becoming almost singsong in its undirected anxiety as he got toward the end of his none to friendly indictment of the green one's usual MO in such situations.

"_Fine_," Beast Boy muttered back irritably, "where are we trying to get to anyway? Dude, I'm going to have a _totally_ unpleasant close encounter with one of these knife-things any second now, and I don't even know where you're _going_!"

"I think I see a terminal of some kind over at that side of the room. I'm thinkin that maybe I can use it to get us an exit outta this place," Cyborg explained without emotion, the green guy's constant chatter distracting him from the delicate process of squeezing his huge legs between the closely packed machines. With them parked like they were, their blades came right in around his knees, and he'd already gotten at least one bad scratch in his finish from edging between them.

"If the terminal is over _there_," Beast Boy began with unusual decisiveness in his tone, causing Cyborg to pause in the next open area and look back, "Then why are we messing around back _here_?" Without giving Cyborg time to question what he was up to, the small guy leapt up into the air and gained about a hundred pounds of lift muscle, shifting into a giant pterodactyl and pumping up into the air just above Cyborg. Before the big guy could do more than bellow and yelp in surprise, Beast Boy had snatched him off the ground by his shoulders and was carting him through the open air of the enormous robot hanger with great beats of his gigantic wings.

As he wobbled and bobbed through the air under the flapping Beast Boy, Cyborg began to scream indistinct curses at him for making him into cargo. After a barrel roll that flung him up and almost cracked his head against the ceiling, then a jolting catch before his return to earth, Cyborg was a just a bit more polite. He was still more than a little short with the guy, however, when he found them both rushing toward the edge of the room and the slightly clear area with the computer far too quickly to stop in time.

"Wall! Beast Boy—_WALLL_!" he shouted in a panic as they got within twenty feet of the plain metal barrier that threatened to efficiently and very painfully halt their forward momentum. Still they did not slow, and Cyborg held out his arms to catch the impact just as the world fell out around him.

He hit the ground squarely in the clear area, his massive inertia leaving him in a spark-throwing skid as he slid and scraped along the metal floor. Unable to gain real traction, he was forced to grasp and paw at the plain steel as he skidded at rather high speed toward the computer terminal. Finally, he lifted his hand and slammed it down again, driving his metal fingers into the floor and halting with a sudden jarring jerk. When he relaxed, he spread out slightly on the floor, and his legs actually reached the computer terminal, which he'd apparently come only inches away from smashing to bits.

Beast Boy meanwhile had been doing his thing. After nearly smashing their only hope of egress with his bonehead dive-bombing run, dropping Cy like an enormous living projectile, he shot up into the air from the lessened weight and used the motion in his landing. Five feet from the wall, he transformed into a spider monkey, canceling all his speed with some feather-light simian acrobatics before striking the horizontal surface gently and kicking off backward into a spectacular series of flips and twists. In a very un-monkey manner, he landed a few feet from Cyborg, then thrust his chest out and his arms into the air like an Olympic gymnast, transforming back to normal while holding that pose.

"HA!" he exclaimed without opening his eyes or moving, "Robin's got _nothing_ on me!"

Cyborg didn't wait, he reached out and snatched him by the neck of his costume while still prone, instantly choking him somewhat and forcing his arms to scrabble at his metal wrist in a panic as his eyes bulged at the pressure on his throat. Pulling his own body up off the ground, Cyborg lifted him off his feet, then brought him within inches of his face and began to glare furiously into his eyes at point-blank rage.

"I _think_ what you _MEAN_… is that you've got _nuthin_ in your _HEAD_!" Cyborg screamed so loud it actually blew the other guy's hair back somewhat, but then the little guy was beginning to suffocate on his own costume and his frantic scrabbling was growing weak, so Cy dropped him to the ground to once more lie in a graceless heap.

"Heh… eheh heh… no harm done right?" Beast Boy managed to squeeze out past a coughing fit, a nervous smile on his face as he realized the magnitude of his mistake, "computer's… right over there!"

"You," Cyborg spat the word as though to make it stick to Beast Boy's face, "_don't_ _move_. _I'm_ gonna get this thing runin, and I don't need any more of your 'help,'" and Cyborg's tone left no room for argument.

"Cool… cool dude…." Beast Boy backed away from the furious and much larger man without complaint, glad to be away with all his teeth considering the guy's expression, "I'll just… go scout around… or something—"

"NO!" and Cyborg caught him by his tiny leg before his quickly assumed bat form could get away, his large wings flapping uselessly for some seconds before he realized he'd been caught. Cyborg tossed him to the ground again, then finished with, "_just__stay__there_."

With that final word, Cyborg turned from the dour changeling and shined his lamp on the enormous computer terminal complex that dominated this entire portion of the room. The robots were arrayed in their expanding rings behind him, but here on the edge was a big open area for the apparent controls, currently just as lonely and abandoned as the rest of this hangar seemed in the dark. Searching briefly, he located an access port, extended a data spike from his right index finger and interfaced with the system.

After fiddling with a simplistic password protection for a few seconds, he was granted preliminary access, and the terminal activated. Lights and screens lit up all over the place as the extensive control setup for the base came online. The larger room, however, remained creepily dark, its vast expanses not unlike a cave, barely lit by the reflected light from Cyborg's lamp and the gentle glow of the terminals. Satisfied that his entrance into the system hadn't alerted anyone or anything, Cyborg turned to the task of extracting necessary information from the thing.

As he ran through the databanks, he was quickly confronted by a large problem. Though system access had been a pathetic excuse for an encrypted password, vast tracts of the internal data were not only under cryptorgasmic lockdown ten ways to Tuesday, but as far as he could tell, they were recorded in a language (ahem… _programming_ language) he couldn't even read! Ignoring these parts for now, he instead filtered through until he located something he _could_ read and poured quickly over that.

He almost cried in relief when the unencrypted data was the base schematic and automated control protocol, and he got to work on this right away, informing his depressed buddy of the good news.

"Phew!" Beast Boy shared in his relief, the unspoken terror of being trapped down here with an army of hostile machines that could at any moment awaken and attack leaving them both slowly as the good news sunk in. "At least you're having more luck with this one than the one upstairs!" he added thoughtlessly, and Cyborg was immediately inclined to defend his abilities.

"The way I figure it," he began as he worked through the process of gaining the primitive system AI's trust, "the terminal upstairs was a decoy… you know, to make us think we'd found the base. That little room probably connects to other fake stuff just in case you actually crack that annoying-ass security system that was kicking my butt all over the place. _Your_ crazy luck found some kind of trap and/or emergency access to their actual base!"

"The great Beast Boy strikes again!" he bragged from his lounging position in the dark behind Cyborg, immediately making the big man regret veiling his insult. He'd been trying to take the little shit down a notch.

"Damnit man!" he complained, "we're just damn lucky there wasn't anybody home, or else we woulda been _dicked_! If those robots back there had been active, they coulda buried what was left of us in the same thimble!"

"Nah… these things don't look that tough," Beast Boy continued to brag despite Cyborg's efforts to impress some caution into him. The metal man truly hoped that Beast Boy's bravado was some kind of reaction to the way he was screwed up inside, because he'd get himself killed if he actually believed what he was saying.

"Okay, let me explain this to you B.B.," Cyborg began, and the distant but serious tone he had actually caught the younger guy's attention, "because this isn't your everyday situation were in right now, so I could see how you might be confused."

"First of all, these aint your daddy's robots we've got lined up behind us. I ran through some blueprints in this database I'm cracking, and I gotta say I'm impressed. These things use some kinda anti-gravity technology I don't even _pretend_ to understand to reach maximum airspeeds right around attack helicopters, but they're about a million times more maneuverable, like hummingbirds with blaster cannons. On top of that, those cannons they mount are checked out for anti-tank duty, or at least to crack open any of the ceramic-composite stuff we use on _this_ planet."

"What do you mean _this_ planet?" Beast Boy asked suspiciously, his voice lighting with sudden excitement. Cyborg could literally feel the obnoxious outburst coming, but he answered anyway, eager to get the episode over with.

"Well, since you seem to have missed the whole anti-grav and super-blaster comments, I'll just go ahead and spell it out for ya. These robots—they aint of this Earth man."

"WHOAH! Why didn't I see it before?" and Cyborg felt something inside wither as it began _again_, "This is _exactly_ how it happened in 'Invasion of the Brain Eating Martians from Venus III'! _Dude_, we've got to get out of here before the tentacled brain-sucking horrors show up! I'm _too_ _pretty_ to have suction marks on my forehead!"  
"SHUT UP!" Cyborg screamed in frustration as he reached his threshold for Beast Boy's idiotic antics. He was about three seconds from blowing a circuit before he finally lost it, and thankfully his outburst killed Beast Boy's irrational yammering without mercy.

"Thank you," Cyborg said calmly then. "If you'll recall, Skye said he chased some extraterrestrial-type criminals to Earth. If I had to guess, I'd bet this was their stuff. Get me now?" Cyborg seriously doubted that the younger man did, but he held out hope yet.

"So wait," Beast Boy began to wrack his brain over this, apparently trying to reconcile it with his 'what I saw in a movie' style of reasoning, "Five escaped alien cons come to Earth, and then they build an army of robots, and then they have a war with Slade, our human supercriminal."

"Yes!" Cyborg exclaimed in unexpected satisfaction, looking away from his work on the computer to gaze in pleasant surprise at how quickly he'd caught on.

"No Duh Dude, that's like, _totally_ the plot of 'Slimefather Part 2: The Revenge'" he said with a huge smile as he remembered the film, completely forgetting the situation at hand for the time being. Cyborg felt his hopes disintegrate instantly, turning away with a soured smile to shake his head in disgrace.

"Beast Boy, how about you leave all the thinking to the rest of us?" Cyborg suggested sarcastically.

"Now _that's_ something I can handle!" Beast Boy replied enthusiastically, still riding waves of good movie memories, absolutely anything being better than the turmoil waiting just behind the veil of self-absorbed musings.

Former Site of Green Construction—Hiding Place

"_…Raven! …Raven! …Raven_!" Skye tried again and again to beam a new thought to the prone woman and bring her back to consciousness. Unfortunately, unlike his ESP, his telepathy was taking its sweet time regenerating, as usual, and he truly didn't think he'd be able to span the few inches between them anywhere _near_ soon enough to make a difference in what was coming. He was bordering on desperation, his hopeless worry causing him to breath in quick shallow gasps despite the way this stressed his nerve block with new pain from his guts. It was looking decidedly grim right up until the new presence formed in the pitch black of their hiding place.

Skye's ESP picked up on the third party's arrival instantly, and after a moment of unadulterated shock, he felt himself fill with a wash of sweet relief. Out of beams of sparkling pure white and pure black spirit energy formed the outline of a small animal, one that was _very_ familiar to Skye. In a moment, the beams began to trace fine detail into the outline, filling in the frame with extravagant fur and noble feline features cast in a decidedly aloof expression. Finally, the spiritual illustration was complete, and the small space he and Raven had taken refuge in became somewhat tighter as a new physical presence appeared between them.

"Meow?" said Benvolio the spectral cat. When Skye didn't answer right away, he walked over through the pitch black and placed a paw on the gem gracing Skye's left hand.

(Shift to thought speed)

"Oh damn Ben, am I ever glad to see you!" Skye admitted the instant he was in mental contact with the very special feline his sisters had obtained so many years ago. "I take it that your presence here means that you felt the shift too?" With the promise of aid that his long time companion's arrival entailed, it was suddenly easy to be nonchalant. The cat generated an image of itself along the link, and answered with a twist of its head to the side, giving him a cockeyed stare that he could very easily interpret.

"Yeah, I hear you. That kind of thing only happens once every… what, five hundred years? I can't be sure, but I think it was triggered when I finally admitted to myself what I've been feeling all this time. _He's_ here Ben." The cat hissed viciously, no more explanation necessary for the cat to know exactly whom he meant. Benvolio had every bit as much reason to hate _His_ guts as Skye.

"Even more than that though," and Skye's mental voice lifted with happiness that was usually very rare when mention of _him_ had been made recently, "I've been reading what I can out of the new pathways, and I'll be damned if this isn't _it_ man. This is what we've been waiting for… the threads seem to be aligning for the go ahead. _We_ _could_ _get_ _them_ _back_!" and Skye's voice almost baked with barely restrained desire before he could reign himself in. He'd been waiting, biding his time, but now finally it was nearly here. Of course, the IDP, four supercriminals, and _that_ guy all stood between him and any chance at rescuing them, but he could deal with this.

It was around then that he remembered that he was on something of a timetable, very much more imminent troubles coming to mind as his excitement was forcibly subdued by his PV. The cat's tail was snaking in excitement at the through of retrieving his favorite two beings in the universe, so it took a bit of doing to recapture his attention.

"Ben, you've got to help me out here!" Skye requested urgently when he'd finally gotten the feline's mind back in the present. He got the usual cattish reluctance in response, a gentle undulation of the cat's tail expressing utter contempt for Skye's whole situation. It could be so hard working with this guy.

"Well excuse me Mr. 'Freshly Groomed Fur', but I'd like to see what shape you'd be in after dealing with a class II demonic manifestation, a specially built esper assassin, and those two follow-up bots! Now please man, just do me a favor and press Zeph's gem against Raven's skin somewhere?" The cat image stretched and preened for a moment, then he broke the connection.

(Realtime)

Ben could be difficult, but he was in essence a great guy, and he carried out Skye's request without further trouble. Digging his claws into the gauntlet currently pressed over Skye's injury, he slowly dragged the cumbersome limb the short distance to where Raven had crumpled to sleep, pressing the gem on the back of his palm to the small of her back. The cloak provided momentary resistance, but Ben pressed down on Skye's arm until he was able to slip a thought directly into her spirit and connect to her mind. He immediately set about the process of giving her the same treatment he'd given Robin the other day in the med-bay. It took a good ten minutes, and he was sweating profusely as he began to shiver in acute weakness, but he finally pulled the rug out from under her sleep cycle and shoved her quite mercilessly back into full consciousness.

(Raven)

"Oooohhhh," Raven moaned in distinct discomfort as she stirred, a splitting headache arcing through her skull as she struggled to get her eyes open. The world had only moments ago faded away, the last distinct memory of hers being the colorful comments she'd arrayed to express her immediate impression of Skye's motivational technique. There was a ghost of that image he'd sent her still floating around her head, and it had been threatening to become a nasty nightmare when everything had suddenly cleared again. Now why the hell was it so hard to get her eyes open?

"Skye?" she asked groggily, knowing it could only be due to him that she was in this miserable state. Until she could figure out why her eyes weren't opening, she was forced to bumble blindly on her stomach in this cramped space, and she wanted very much to let her newest teammate know how she felt about the situation. In graphic detail.

"_I'm here Raven_," he answered her simply, and the direct telepathic method of the answer combined with a strange weight on her back to tell her that Skye was still _seriously_ out of commission. Oh boo-hoo for him.

"Skye, can I just ask you, what did _I_ ever do to _you_?" she inquired sarcastically as the headache began to take on epic proportions and the ache of deep and now long-denied fatigue crawled through her body.

"_If I'm not mistaken, you put your trust in me. I'm afraid that comes with obligations for the both of us_," he passed the thought through the hand on her back and directly into her mind.

"I _knew_ there was a reason I promised myself not to do that anymore," she muttered under her breath as she finally managed to get her knees under her body and pull herself off of the ground slightly. The weight slid unresistingly from her back and hit the ground next to her with a loud clink, but when she turned toward the noise, she created a clank of her own as her head hit the wreckage above them. Cursing bitterly on the inside, she began to feel around in the dark for Skye, understandably reluctant to find him considering the shocking experience it was liable to be. Thankfully, he managed to find her, as a sudden pressure against her knee where she knelt scrunched over in the cramped space carried with it his presence on the edge of her mind once more.

"Skye, do you mind telling me why I can't seem to get my eyes open?" she asked offhandly, way too tired to realize how stupid that question sounded.

"Raven, your eyes are open," he answered without the slightest hint of condensation or contempt, "it's just fucking dark in here. Allow me."

Instantly the space lit up bright as day, a filtered feed of Skye's senses revealing the little area completely to her view. She was able to see every little detail of every nook and cranny, despite the fact that their private hole in the wreckage was darker than a shadow in hell. It was a not-so subtle reminder of just who she was in league with here, and she appreciated the small comfort that came with this knowledge.

"Okay, now this is just neat," she admitted with only the slightest reservation in her now neutral voice, "but why, might I ask, is there a cat in here with us?"

The feline in question circled once where it stood, then flicked its tail arrogantly, as though to say "why wouldn't there be a cat here?" Skye's mental voice huffed in tired amusement, then answered her question.

"You've met Ben, Raven. He caught wind of the same precognitive disturbance I've been suffering through while you were getting your much-deserved rest, then rushed here from my astral beacon to help out. Unfortunately, when the winds of fate changed directions, we wound up with another load on our plate."

"No," Raven said without preamble, just generally rejecting it all. She was too damn tired, even now she could feel unconsciousness creeping up on her through the pounding in her skull, and she just couldn't fight it off this time. "Skye, I don't know who you think I am… but I'm… completely…" she paused to yawn, "wiped out. I'm going to pass out right here, and there's really nothing you could possibly say right now that would stop me."

Having settled that, at least in her own completely run down mind, she keeled over onto a comfortable looking spot on the crumbled-stone floor and pulled her cloak around herself, arranging the hood as a pillow. The process took her out of contact with Skye's hand, and so she was blissfully ignorant of any protest he might make. She nestled into her little space on the edge of their shared hole, closed her eyes, and noticed with a sinking feeling that she could _still_ see every little detail of every nook and cranny, despite the fact that their private hole in the wreckage was darker than… well, you know. Knowing she'd regret it, she reached out a finger to touch that stone, once again getting a feeling of cold emptiness, and she asked simply, "Mind turning out the lights for me?"

"Raven, you know I wouldn't be bothering you at all if this wasn't something you'd really want to be in on," Skye instantly started in on persuading her, and she seriously contemplated just _doing_ the (currently) unthinkable amount of work personally expelling his entire presence from her mind would entail rather than listening.

"I _defy_ you to come up with _one_ reason I shouldn't succumb to unconsciousness right this instant," she muttered unpleasantly as her head began to fill with cotton and she found herself breathing deeply from the exertion of keeping her eyes open.

"It's Terra," he stated immediately, "We're her last hope."

Score one for Skye.

"Damn." She stated once for the record, then felt compelled to continue with, "Damn, Damn, Damn, Damn, DAMN!" Raven repeated it over and over again until she finally shouted her frustration to the unimpressive audience of Skye and a Spectral Cat she couldn't even comprehend the existence of.

"Raven?" he asked with concern, but she cut in with:

"_I'm_ _up_!" as though to stave off a pestering parent trying to get her to school on time. "There's no rest for the wicked huh?"

"Of course there's rest for the wicked," he answered matter-of-factly, as though everybody knew what he was explaining to her. "It's us responsible ones that are always running ourselves ragged taking care of it all."

"So we're responsible," she muttered miserably as she tried desperately to clear her mind for some teleportation, "Yay us."

"Agreed. Responsibility sucks major ass. But if we don't do it, who will?"

"Please," and Raven was completely serious, "don't ask depressing questions like that when I'm trying to wake up."

Peer Park Base—Underground

As the next barrage of laser fire toasted through the air with that horrendous crackling/burning sound, Cyborg ducked more closely behind the shield of half-destroyed robots. The air was alive with the low-key humming of those god-forsaken anti-gravity drives as the hundred upon hundred of flying saucers buzzed around the spot he and Beast Boy had dug into, their whole force creating a kind of semi-circular wall to close off the rest of the hanger while they stood off about a hundred feet and just blasted at the two of them. The air was getting so hot from continual laser fire that the beams were actually bending and diffracting halfway to them, and so now the things had cut back to launching one inconceivable barrage at a time, giving the quickly depleting air time to cool between each attack. The patient bastards.

"Well B.B. I don't know _how_ you did it, but you did it… _again_!" Cyborg shouted over the roaring of heat-induction wind and the humming of engines, pausing to take a deep gasp of the furnace-hot air that got thinner with every barrage. Sweat poured down the human side of his face in rivulets as he endured the wasting heat.

"Don't even _try_ to pin this one on me dude!" Beast Boy screamed, then transformed back into a gorilla for a second so he could take a barrage of the metal spikes they were also very fond of. The weird super-tech shields that had been deflecting all the laser blasts for them had no effect on the spikes, and it was only a matter of time before the bots they were hiding behind completely came apart. That was, if the two of them didn't suffocate or pass out from the heat first.

"And why not?" Cyborg questioned when the guy had become human again and another lull had come through. The things had them massively outnumbered, but only a few would attack at a time, as though they were playing with them, picking them apart piece by piece.

"Dude, this is SO your fault. You were the one who couldn't leave well enough alone--" he took another burning barrage with its flash of super hot air, "and had the brilliant idea of planting a BOMB in the enemy hangar!"

"Oh no man, don't go there!" Cyborg protested over the sound of those blades clanging into one of his two shields. "It was our best chance to get rid of these things without actually having to fight them! Besides, we don't even know if that was what set them off!"

"PROCEED TO STAGE TWO OF EMERGENCY BOMB PROTOCOL," spoke an artificially pleasant female voice over the noise of the battle raging in the hangar, and Beast Boy glared unpleasantly as Cyborg took on a decidedly pale expression of embarrassment and defeat.

"Okay, so maybe it _is_ my fault this time, that doesn't change the fact that we gotta get outta here before we're toasted! Stage two is probably when they try and disarm those explosives we set on the fuel tanks! If we don't get outta here and trigger the bomb before that, we're totally _screwed_!"

"DUDE!?" Beast Boy shouted, his eyes bulging in uncomprehending horror, "If we don't get out of here in the next ten seconds, we're gonna be screwed ANYWAY!"

"Follow me!" Cyborg shouted then, deciding the time had come to make a move after only a second of contemplating his friend's unhappy declaration. There really wasn't time to despair right now.

In a way, he kind of loathed to leave the defensive position they'd set up, considering the ordeal it had been to get even that far. He'd hacked the computer and gotten full access without too much trouble, and opening the sea hatch had been further cake to walk over. The room had pressurized with an explosive hissing, and an enormous porthole had opened in the floor back in the central space they'd landed in. He'd downloaded as much of the coded information as he could hold in his secure storage banks, closed down the system, and they were halfway out when he spotted the fuel tanks and come up with his brilliant strategy.

He'd pulled the mines out of the dispenser compartment in his chassis, set them for radio detonation, and attached them to the enormous tanks of liquid hydrogen without any trouble at all. It had been pathetically easy, and the two of them were working their way back to the ocean access port in high spirits. There were about halfway there when things went way bad, way fast.

Without warning, all the lights in the whole place came on at the same time, the ceiling lamps to the landing lights, and the enormous dome was lit up like the midday sun had just flashed to life underground. With a series of clicking sounds that began quietly at the center of the room, then quickly spread outward until it was like a symphony of mechanical motion, every single robot checked its turrets and blades. By the time the sound had reached its terrible crescendo, the first ones had finished, and that awful humming started to underlay the clicking as they took off. They immediately had issue with the two guys.

Cyborg had popped the first two to come their way with quick sonic blasts to the sensor spots, dropping them to the ground an sending their serrated sides rolling through the ranks of those yet to finish powering up. He tried to drop a third, but they had caught on, and the big discus looking bastards started to buzz around, strafing with their cannons almost indiscriminately. Multiple shots went wide as he dashed over those robots still starting up, making for the ocean portal as bet he could. With every leaping stomp, he crushed the sensor spot of a robot yet to take off, and the spay of lasers was kicking up a hot storm of melted metal behind him as he kept only feet ahead of their targeting programs. He cleared the last row still on the ground and made a flying lunge for the large opening that would be his exit.

Feet from the surface, he'd taken a huge hit in the stomach. One of the flying saucer bastards had rammed him in the chest with those blades at high speed, tossing sparks off his armor as the spines stuck into him, and much more dangerously, carrying him far away from the exit. In seconds he was nearly to the side of the room, and he realized with a shock that the thing was going to try and impale him against the wall. For the moment, he was pinned against the blades by the gees the thing was pulling, but he could still see around the room as he struggled to move.

He caught a glimpse of what the rest were up to, as now around half of all the robots had gotten off the ground. A great cloud of them was broiling through the room at high speed in pursuit of something he couldn't see, but he'd make a guess that it was B.B. in the shape of something fast and flight-ready. The little guy could have split with no trouble, but he was now threading his way through a firestorm of hot light and toward his distressed ally, his erratic flight dragging the robots into one another and forcing their beams to hit their own forces as well. Times like that were the reason Cyborg stuck with the little guy (besides the fact that, every now and then, he actually _was_ pretty funny).

He'd gotten control of his own situation around then as well, smashing his fist into the top sensor and his knee into the bottom sensor at the same time and pinching the thing through its middle, he was able to send the both of them spiraling toward the ground. Snatching it by its top mounted turrets, he turned it upward just in time to start deflecting laser beams from a whole flight of the suckers that had just gotten off the ground and after him. As his feet dug into the metal floor and tossed up great clouds of sparking fire, the beams came in like a rain of burning air. The very instant he came to a stop, they switched to those blades, and rather than the feather-light deflection of the beams, he was staggered back by the impact of a dozen solid slugs.

The next moment, they flew over him, and he pulled his arm cannon on them only instants before they got their cannons turned around, holing all five of them and sending them careening into the corner on their own momentum. Just how insignificant a dent this made in their forces became apparent when the still-increasing mass trying to shoot down B.B. went buzzing by in a cloud of flash-heated air and flying metal spikes. As the little flying dude ducked out of the _way_ too hot conflict and into the cover of the bots Cyborg had just downed, the metal man was left high and dry only a few feet from a swarm of _very_ unhappy seeming automated strike craft. Needless to say, he'd retreated under a withering hail of laser blasts that were deflected by the conveniently active shield on the saucer he was dragging around. Which brings us to the rather hopeless situation we came in on.

"Follow me!" Cyborg shouted again, then took off along the curving edge of the enormous dome hanger. Beast Boy abandoned his cover to rush in behind Cyborg, clinging to his back as a ferret and keeping close behind the cover of the same bot that had tried to impale him only moments ago. As Cyborg dragged the pin-cushion of alien technology around the room and enemy fire slid off its electromagnetic shield like quicksilver off of a slanted table, the entire enemy formation of its many hundreds of members rotated through the center of the room to track them. Its purpose was pretty clearly to keep them away from the exit port, which was exactly what Cyborg had been hoping for.

After the next barrage, he pulled his last mine out of the compartment on his back, set its timer by remote from direct radio access by his brain, then gave it a huge discus throw into the center of the room while the air was still too hot to shine a laser through. His throw sent him through a twirl that exposed both him and his diminutive green rider to the room as a whole, and a series of blades went whizzing uncomfortably close by, but he had the shield up between him and the center of the room again before the explosive went off.

That concussion was enough to blow an enormous hole in the center of their formation, bladed discs careening every which way, smashing into one another and the floor with destructive effect. As the whole mass of them was thrown into a pandemonium of destabilized thrust by the roiling air, Cyborg dumped the shield, grabbed the ferret off his back with his left, and blasted his grappling hand directly for the ocean access with its wide-eyed furry passenger. The beams started in almost right away, but the disruption caused by his bomb ensured his little buddy a safe passage to the water, and he hit it with a huge splash that Cyborg could feel jolting all the way back up the cable extending from his left elbow.

There was the sound of water being displaced in a big way, like say, a whale kicking its tail, and then Cyborg himself was careening toward the water ten times faster than his wench could have pulled him. His legs began to glow with the heat of lasers nearly plugging him, and one lucky shot did put a huge melted mark on his right shoulder, but he cleared the enormous distance between the room's wall and the ocean access in record time, and the water hissed around his hot armor as he entered with a skidding splash. He was going so fast that the water offered quite a resistance to his entrance, and strains screeched through his superstructure as super alloys met their match in the tug of war between the multi-ton mass of swimming muscle Beast Boy had become and the enormous drag his metal can created in the water, but he managed to hold together, and a quick look ahead showed the beastly one dragging him through some kind of underwater, underground tunnel.

The second he was fully immersed and certain that he wasn't about to be parted from some hunk of his body boy his friend's well-meaning but painfully huge motive force, Cyborg triggered the detonator on his mines with a simple command to his internal radio equipment. The whole tunnel rocked with the explosion of the vast supply of liquid hydrogen fuel, the water cushioning the shock for them, but the whole place coming apart around them none the less. There was a flash of light down the tunnel as the incinerating hydrogen-oxygen reaction turned the room they'd been in into an inferno, no doubt the ridiculous expansion forces eradicating anything the intense heat failed to destroy. He could hear earth moving in a big way above him through the conductive water, and he figured the sea floor must have caved in on the base as structural integrity was lost in the dome. As those parts of his system that required air began to protest, not the least of which being the organic part of his brain, he began to wonder in a kind of euphoric haze what would be left of the park when they got back to the surface.

Just then, he and Beast Boy broke out of the tunnel into the pitch-black nighttime waters just off the coast, his massive friend dragging him quickly to the surface. The pressurized air in his lungs began to pain him, so he let it all out as they rose toward the surface, freeing plenty of room for his first explosive breaths as both he and Beast Boy broke the surface at high speed. As his ballast systems sucked in air to keep his heavily armored butt afloat, Beast Boy floated languidly by on his back, a mechanical hand still gripped firmly to his leg. He crawled onto the now-seaworthy craft Cyborg had become and collapsed from his efforts.

"Cyborg?" Beast Boy asked exhaustedly as the two of them lay floating in the ghostly silver waters of the moonlit night.

"Yeah?" he asked with similar fatigue as he watched damage reports march parade-like across his HUD.

"I think… I think I'm done for the night."

"Yeah."

Behind them, part of the Ferris Wheel stuck out of the water, burning steadily. The entirety of the pier and most of the beach was now a bit of scrap wood and some shattered cement pillars. Most noteworthy of all however, was the half of a two hundred-foot crater that had swallowed the road and shore next to the pier, the rest of the depression disappearing into the silent water.

Preview: Hey, guess what. This time, the night really does come to an end, and since I'm already halfway through it, it should be up in a matter of days. I was trying to put it all in this one and call it a single chapter, but it just wouldn't have been right to make people a) wait longer for this, or b) read a chapter that long. We'll follow everyone as the night winds to a close, Skye and Raven get in one last big adventure, and we see if Terra will actually survive the story. Tune back in around Thursday/Friday and you'll be able to get the last of this installment—Dawn.


	19. GW5: Dawn

Intro: Let me start by apologizing for my extended absence. I believe that by the time I post this, it will have been right around two months since last anyone heard from me on this site. The only reason I have to offer is the quite simple but completely serious affliction known only as MMORPG. World of Warcraft snuck into my computer over the holidays and sucked out my soul in the way those games have a tendency to manage, and I have been having a hell of a time getting this one out, even though I had it 70 finished before I got the game. Never in my life have I encountered a more devious thief of human creativity and motivation, and once again I apologize for the extensive nature of my delay in posting this. Though for obvious reasons they won't know about it, I particularly apologize to anyone who gave up on reading the story because of my extensive absence. Without further delay, the most recent chapter of The Albino Telepath Saga.

Chapter 19- Dawn

Former Site of Green Construction

"Are you sure we can't do anything else to help out Miss Raven?" asked one of the many rescue workers that had been attending to them quite politely since Raven had slipped the two of them from their peaceful refuge and back into the chaotic mess of the disaster site.

"Actually," she said tiredly as she tried not to long too obviously for the exquisite looking accommodations of the cots spread between the first-aid tents, "there might be something you can do…"

"_NO_!" it was Skye who put his foot down without question, beaming the flat rejection into her mind through the small link he could maintain as long as she didn't get too far away. He could only even manage that much since she'd engaged it initially with a thought into that gem on his right hand again. It was actually about this deplorable state of his power that the present standoff existed.

"_Skye, you said yourself that we've no chance of finding her unless you get some power back_," Raven plied her argument into him yet again, having found his core metaphysical hang up at last. Who would have thought a guy that could walk his way through demons and robots without batting an eyelash would have such a simple phobia?

"_I'm not going to do it Raven, not while even the slightest chance of anything else working exists_!" His vehemence was blunted by the weakness of his mental tone, and it was kind of hard to take him seriously when the medics were patching the hole in his limp body, but she got the message rather quickly. It was time to do to him what he'd done to her. Advancing over to the gurney he sat on while they finished wrapping that awful wound (which had closed and stopped bleeding, but which was purpling all up and down his pale abdomen), she touched the gem on his right hand.

(Shift to thought speed)

"Skye, I didn't crawl back from the brink of unconsciousness just so we could loose Terra because your afraid to borrow a little life energy!" There, she'd cast her lot, and now it was time to see how it would fall out. He was speechless for a moment, and she could feel his mind skipping through volumes of shock at what she'd just said to him.

"Don't—Don't talk to me like you know what it is to steal someone's life!" he snapped, as viciously as any condemnation she'd ever made. It was the most fiercely he'd ever spoken to her, and the boiling anger behind the words was worse for her connection to his mind. She actually cringed away as the heat of it hit her psyche and breathed life into that portion of her soul.

"It… it seems we've found your temper Mr. Skye," she said calmly as she got her feelings back under control. The words were without any emotion at all, but as his anger faded like it was prone to he was filled with such contrition that you'd have thought she'd hit him.

"Raven… I…." His mind stumbled through the phrasings of an apology, but she accepted it with a mental shrug before he really embarrassed himself.

"You're absolutely right Skye, I have no idea what it is that you're so afraid of. Explain it to me, please. These men are more than willing to give of themselves after what we've done for their friends and family, so it's not as though you're robbing them of something. Tell me what it is that gets you like this." Her words held the utmost of neutrality, and as he himself returned to a neutral state after his remorse had drained, he could find no reason to object.

"Alright, if you must know…" and his mental tone paused and stretched with clear reluctance, "I'm… not afraid of doing it per say—at least—I've done it before when there was no other choice."

"Like now," she supplied.

"Right… but what truly frightens me is… I'm afraid… I might _like_ it."

"………What?" she managed eventually. This hadn't been _anywhere_ on her radar.

"It's impossible to explain to those who have never experienced it… those who haven't had the full first-hand rush of it… exactly what it feels like to take someone else's life into one's own spirit." His mental voice had some truly uncomfortable undertones to it, almost sensual at first taste, and Raven was now seriously regretting pushing him on this point.

"I've never had sex, I've never taken drugs, and I've never entered a completely unrestricted full-communion of minds, but I've experience each of these while plying through the memories of various aliens I've had the unpleasant task of interrogating, so I know what they feel like in a manner of speaking. Draining life energy is _soooo_ much better."

"By Azar…" Raven couldn't help but mutter in shock as she began to get an oh-so slight phantom of what he was talking about through the link. An absolute feeling of well-being and completeness was what he implied, the kind of sensation that elevated the mind above mere pleasure and suspended it up where no other stimulation could possibly reach. The potential for addiction was… it was _terrifying_.

"I know you've met others. Other psychic vampires… the feral, mindless soul-suckers that drop out of the astral plane to prey on the mundane every now and then. Do you happen to know how such creatures come to exist?" his mental voice no longer held any trace of embarrassment, fear, or desire. It didn't hold a trace of humanity either.

"I…" she didn't know what was going on all of a sudden. Her attempt to excite him to action had suddenly become some kind of big trial, and while he wasn't exactly falling apart on her, she didn't see this working out at all the way she wanted it to.

"Beings are born all over the cosmos with power like mine all the time," he began in that dead mental tone. "Every one of them feels the same thing I do when sucking out another being's life force, and almost without exception, they become _addicted_. When you remove someone's life force against their will, when you _steal_ it, it wastes your soul. You can get away with it now and then, but when you do it for kicks, there's just no avoiding it. Your soul degenerates until it leaves your body and you become a _creature_, little better than an animal as you roam the universe searching for living things to reduce for your own base pleasures. I… I couldn't _handle_ something like that."

"Skye…" she was just on a roll for inspirational lines right now.

"It's not even fear," he flattened her weak intervention, "Emotions like that have no real sway over me. It's the _idea_ that gets me, the thought of everything I've worked for in my life: my sisters, my war against the IDP, my work against mental and neurological illness, _everything_ going down the drain as I get sidetracked by the ephemeral promises of sensory gratification. That after all the strife in my life my only legacy would be a short existence as a ravenous soul-eating monster. It hurts… it hurts in a way I can't drain to numbness." Raven let his emotionless tirade run through her mind for a long moment before she said anything. It occurred to her then that they really _were_ quite the sad little pair.

"What? Is that all?" she asked, her neutral tone colored with the contempt she usually reserved for Beast Boy. "Did you forget who you're talking to here? If you can honestly say that you stared into the face of my nasty side and still don't understand that I know _exactly_ what you feel like, you're stupider than I could have ever feared." She could feel his mind churning as that hit it, but she didn't give him a chance to recover before her inspiration _finally_ arrived.

"Skye, I'm going to do something here I wouldn't do for just anyone," and her mental voice took off without her even thinking about it. "Seeing as how we're friends and all… I propose we make a pact. You've already made the first gesture, and that's the only reason I'm even _entertaining_ the briefest _concept_ of this little venture." She couldn't really believe what she heard herself saying, and it would appear that he couldn't either.

"Errr…" his mind grasped hopelessly for what she was getting at, so she decided to pitch her proposition to him somewhat more plainly.

"Listen, you and I could help one another. Each of us has… issues with control. If we were to, say… keep an eye on each other… it might let us both rest easier when unfortunate circumstance brings these issues into conflict with what we want in life. Do you understand?" She was shocked by how roundabout she was being with this, but it just didn't seem right to come out and say that they were each plagued by very real inner demons that they might ally for the containment of.

"Raven, would you really do that for me?" he asked, his voice completely grave, and she instantly knew what the real question was. He'd actually asked her, 'could you really bring yourself to finalize me if the demon can't be stopped?'

"Yes," she answered, not really letting the concept percolate lest she find a real answer that didn't agree with her. "Now will you please come on here?"

"Well… I don't…" he hesitated further, obviously still more than a little hung up about how completely such an act went against his principles, such as they were.

"Recall please that this is an _emergency_!" she snapped irritably into his mind when that hesitation cropped up again. "Like I said—hell, like YOU said—Terra's life is in the balance here. I have volunteers, and we need you working, so can we move this along, please?"

Insensitive, but effective.

"Okay," he finally acceded, heaving an enormous mental sigh in anticipation of what was coming. "Have them touch the left gem."

(Realtime)

When she raised herself from the link, it was to notice that the medics had finished with the bandage and replaced his blood-soaked, holed-through tank top over their work. His equally bloody button-down lay to the side somewhere, and lying there, eyes closed, completely limp, pale as death, he looked like he wouldn't survive the night. He'd assured her that he'd recover fully with time, but it was a little hard to believe just looking at him.

"You guys," she indicated to the workers who'd been asking to help out earlier. They walked over, to the best of their knowledge only an instant after she had, the telepathic conversation occupying all of a second or two of actual time. "If you really want to help out the Teen Titans, it's going to have to be in a rather odd, mystical way. If you have a problem with that, you should leave now."

"Uh… No offense Miss Raven, but magic is against my religion," copped out one that had been looking leery of his friend's offers all along. Raven dissuaded them from pressuring into helping out anyway, and he left, leaving four.

"As you can see, my friend here is in a little bit of trouble." She began her explanation, only to be cut off right away by an enthusiastic volunteer in his early twenties.

"A little? Man, I saw that guy get gutted by that nasty spider-robot-thing! If you think he's only in a little trouble, you may want to look again kid!"

"_I assure you, sir_," and she put a threat into the words that cowed the schmo immediately, more for calling her 'kid' than for any other reason, "he'll be fine. He's a Titan just in from out of town, and you'd be doing us all a big favor if you helped us out with this."

The common inquiry was simply, 'what did they have to do?'

"If you could just come around to the other side of the gurney and touch that red gem on his left hand, we'll take care of the rest." She omitted a great deal, but what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them. They filed around the prone psychic, gathered on his left side, and with various trepidatious looks, crowded around to place a finger on the large gem.

"Now, you may feel a slight pinch," Raven relayed Skye's mental warning, and each of them had just enough time to blanch before Skye stuck it to them.

There were no fancy lights or spiritual explosions this time, not with the gentle, willing transaction that took place. There was the slightest rushing of wind over the smoking rubble and sporadic fires, rustling the busy first-aid encampment's tents and setting the odd shiver down the occasional spine, but that was more likely a coincidence than a side effect of the action. Each of the men jerked away from Skye in the same sudden movement, emitting various yips and gasps of surprise as the sting they'd received drove them back. They took a moment out to collapse or keel over in various states of advanced fatigue while something else began to happen to Skye.

Somewhere in there he'd sheered the connection they'd been talking with, and now she was completely shut out of his mind as he was afflicted by whatever it was he'd been talking about before. Muscles tightened across his body as his face left its limp set to cringe through an incomprehensible tortured expression. For the first time since he'd lost it on the rocks, he moved, his arm flashing up from his side to cover his eyes as whatever he was feeling began to really flare up. Without warning, he sat up with a start, his whole body seeming wracked with pain as he jerked a few times at random intervals. Finally, however, his motions came to a stop and he sat perfectly still on the bed with his blood-caked gauntlet pressed over his face. He never made a sound.

"How do you feel—" Raven started, incredibly glad to see him up again despite the creepy way he'd handled the recovery, only to be cut off when he held up his free hand for silence. She was more than a little irked, and she took up a _very_ dissatisfied expression in protest of his interruption.

Skye ignored her coolly, rolling slowly off the gurney with an awful groaning sound, getting his feet back under himself. He continued to basically ignore her as he went about quite a little bit of business.

First, he met the arrival of that cat of his, which darted through the air in a swirl of motion and formed back into solid state next to him on the gurney. It dropped something small and black, and Raven realized that it was Skye's sunglasses, which he promptly replaced over his eyes, his whole face softening as he opened them again after all that time looking like a sleepwalker. He then hopped down to the ground and ran his hands over his filthy tank top. When he finished, the gaping hole showing off his bloody bandage was gone, completely repaired. She was still getting over this when he grabbed the hem of his shirt and shook it fiercely around his body, throwing off the bloodstain in a flapping of red flakes, leaving his undershirt pretty well pristine.

Grabbing his button down, he repeated the process, removing the holes and beating it into the air to get the blood out, then putting that on with a quick slipping motion that belied his awful injuries. He finished with a flourish, grabbing his gun belt and slinging it around his waist _under_ his open button down, then buckling it with the same motion. As Raven began to become less fascinated and much more impatient, he slipped his sidearm neatly from its holster, spun it gracefully in his right hand a few times, then popped open the back to look at a half-full dial Raven could only assume was the ammunition readout. He spun it through another long series of loops, flipped it to his left hand and spun it through another series, the slung it out into the air in front of him, grabbed it by the middle just above the barrel with his left again, then slipped it easily back into the low, slanted holster on his left hip.

"Are you quite done now?" she asked sarcastically as she marveled at how much better he looked for his efforts. She was sure she looked like a refugee from a POW work camp, what with the layers of stone dust, Skye's blood, and a smattering of sweat, motor oil, and general grime that would make a mechanic blanch. She would have given everything she owned to get at a warm bath right about now, but this desire was complicated by the fact that she would give her immortal soul _too_ if she could just lie down and sleep for a few years. The burning embarrassment at how she must look next to him at this point actually woke her up a little bit.

"Thanks for waiting Raven, I just had to get things together for a moment," were the first audible words he'd said since his body'd crapped out on him. "It's hard to concentrate at first when I get… you know… _high on life_." He said it with just a shade of embarrassment, and Raven cringed as she shook her head in disappointment.

"I'll bet that one's a _real_ _hit_ with the other psychic vampires," she muttered disgustedly as he grinned at her reaction. Despite the undercurrent of urgency, the moment called for banter, and so banter it was. Little things like that keep people sane when working under sanity-breaking stress.

"Actually, they tend to become hostile when I try it," and he spoke while holding a hand to his head, and Raven could sense him using his power in a big way.

"I can't imagine why," she responded calmly as she internally marveled at the way his consciousness expanded. She'd had a taste of his power, but on her own her mind could only handle a pale shadow of what he was capable of perceiving, and now she was getting a mindfull of what he was truly able to do. With a slightly bored expression on his face, his senses washed over and past her, driving out in every direction until, as far as she could tell through the mild link he'd casually granted her, they encompassed the entire city. He had a spirit view of everything within a twenty-five radius, and he was running through all that vast information, sifting for what he wanted to find.

"Are you _really_ better?" she asked as she waited for him to finish. It seemed too good to be true that draining a pinch-worth of energy from four guys could really put him into his city-scanning prime of mental power after the beating he'd taken, and she was relatively sure that his bandage had grown freshly bloody while he was cleaning his cloths. However, it was curiosity more than concern that motivated her query, it being hard to argue with the _fact_ that he _was_ up and about and throwing his mental weight around.

"In a manner of speaking, you could say that, potentially, I _might_ be considered…" he carried on for a moment with the front of his mind as the search continued in the back, then he gave up and admitted, "…no. I'm absolutely _not_ really better." He ran through what seemed like some really densely populated areas that absorbed all of his attention, then was able to spare some concentration and continued to explain.

"I feel like ten million galactic exchange credits—but it's illusionary, a side effect of drawing on someone else's life force to supplement my own. I'm still wounded and causing myself serious harm by moving around like this, but I don't feel anything but good. My powers haven't actually regenerated, but as long as that extra life energy lasts, I can run through power like water and not feel any drain. Everything ailing me will come back to claim their due twenty times over when this high wears off, which is one of many reasons I _hate_ using this ability. …Get it?"

His question was empty sarcasm that Raven didn't bother dignifying with a response. He was clearly distracted by his task, and so she didn't let his return to those obnoxious mannerisms bother her too much. As a matter of fact, she was forced to put all of her effort into just standing as a wave of fatigue threatened to send her to the ground, and she forgot quite completely about Skye for the long moments they stood across from each other. As she began to get spots of visual blackout here and there she staggered back until she was leaning against an odd piece of wreckage, breathing deeply until she got some sense of equilibrium back. It was actually Skye that brought her out of her half-dozing nightmare of fatigue then.

"I've found our target," he commented without feeling, and her head snapped up from where she'd had it lolling forward as she gasped for air. She could never remember having been this tired… ever.

"Are you ready to go then?" she asked simply, determined to keep up her end of this duo after what she'd forced Skye to do. He'd faced his demon over the life of a woman he didn't know because she'd asked him to, so it would hardly do for her to pass out now. Apparently, she didn't cover her fatigue as well as she thought.

"Are _you_ ready to go?" he asked her right back, no doubt picking up on all kinds of signs she'd never have thought to cover with that super-exact clairvoyant vision of his. Or, rather, he could have simply seen the way her hands trembled and she swayed on her feet in exhaustion. Damn.

"No, I'm ready to sleep for a week, take a bath, then sleep for another week. Why—is that one of my options?" Getting smart with him was once again a defense mechanism against the impulse to burst out crying with extreme exhaustion. Bad jokes definitely _way_ better than unstoppable tears.

"I'll tell you what, get us to our first destination and we'll see what we can do," he responded cryptically, giving her a warm smile for her blind stab at humor. She nodded at him, doubtful that he could do anything to make a real dent in her exhaustion, but willing to let him try anyway. He'd surprised her a couple of times now.

Taking a moment aside then, he went back to the guys he'd zapped for energy, thanking them warmly as they sat or lay around completely drained. After giving them explicit instructions on how to take care of themselves to ensure they got back to full health, he turned away from their almost amusingly stunned and uncomprehending faces to return to the rather urgent task at hand.

"Two to beam out?" she asked, letting humor slip back into her tone now that they'd overcome all that crap and had an actual chance at saving Terra. He grinned back at her tiredly neutral face and pointed down significantly with a gentle shake of his head.

"Three," he commented simply, and Raven looked down just in time for Ben to show up in that weird swirling black mist of his and solidify at her feet.

"Meow?" he commented, when she gave first him, then Skye a long dirty look. She surrendered to the oddness without audible argument, though she projected enough sourness at Skye that he was sure to know her opinion of all this. He sent back the most weirdly reassuring sensation, and she held onto it as best she could as she wrapped the _three_ of them in her power and hurtled them through space. The black energy raven flew once again.

An Empty Street Near Green's Demolished Secondary Base

"Are you sure you're going to be alright?" Robin asked Starfire as he lay her down away from the spreading fires that were now cutting off any pursuit of Slade they might have attempted. As he let her off his shoulder and helped her lean back against a brick building, hidden from the main road by the shadows of the small alley he'd helped her stumble down, he exchanged meaningful stares with her.

"This wound is but a tiny burn Robin," she tried to assure him as she held up the area in question for examination. He couldn't get much of a look at it in the shadows, and as his nose was assaulted by the smell of burnt meat, he was suddenly glad of this fact. The beam had struck just above the armguard, turning a spot on the back of her wrist into a scorched smoking pit of cauterized flesh. Robin's mind reeled through the implications for yet another time as he looked back into her eyes. She'd taken a shot that would have crippled him.

"Starfire…" he struggled for the words that would express what he felt, "you… you shouldn't have done that." His voice was as uncertain as it was uneven, trembling with the mixed emotions he felt.

"Nonsense Robin," she chided him with a tired smile, "I have survived far worse than this small injury." She gave him a much more serious look, and he kind of knew what she was about to say. "Besides, it would have done far worse to you, and I could not allow that."

"But Star I… I'm supposed to be the one protecting you," he complained, knowing how foolish it sounded even as he couldn't help but express the sting to his pride. To be saved by his girlfriend… and it wasn't even the first time. It had never seemed at all embarrassing when she backed him up in the past, when he'd convinced himself that they were only friends, but now it should be different, right?

"Robin," and she gave him the most exquisite look as he kneeled across from where she sat, "I am certain I have already explained this to you. I love you. You love me. That means that we should protect _one_ _another_. You have saved me more times than I can account for, and I will also be there for you when you need me. As before, I do not understand your protest."

"No… Star, you're right," he acceded as the sting in his chest was washed away by the look she had granted him, and he slipped in and forward until he kneeled next to her, pulling her into a passionate embrace. "We'll get through everything together."

They were like that for what seemed like a long time, Starfire's completely drained form gently wrapped around Robin's powerfully reassuring presence. The moment stretched out through the early morning hour like a waking dream, and for a while at least, Robin was able to forget everything that had gone so disastrously wrong for them. Alas, the world is not so kind as to let such a perfect moment go unblemished, and Robin was shaken from his reverie of warm comfort by the cool touch of tears on his neck. Starfire was silently weeping into his shoulder.

"We… we lost Terra again…" she whispered into his ear, and he felt his own heart crack and crumble under the weight of this knowledge. He'd been numb to it, isolated from the ache by a kind of shock at the terrifying change in Slade and his utter defeat by the revitalized villain. "You… you must go and get her back Robin!" Starfire whispered harshly now as her exhausted body managed to grip him slightly tighter. "I am too weak to follow, but you can still—"

"No Star," he cut her off with a gentle tone as he slid down until he sat next to her, breaking their embrace slightly now that the world had come back to him. She began to protest when he continued, "Terra will be okay for now, since Slade thinks he's won. You need me more than she does right now."

"But Robin, we cannot leave our friend in his hands!" she protested more strongly, giving him a terrible look of mixed compassion and fear at what he was saying, "I am fine—you must go after them!"

"You're _not_ fine," Robin told her, because he knew it to be true, "You're freezing, I can see you shivering even now. And besides, I have no intention of leaving her to Slade. Now please… come here?" His voice became particularly gentle and pleading, and so Starfire let the tension run out of her body as she scooted herself closer to him. With a sighing exhalation, she placed her complete trust in him as he straightened himself against the brick wall, then lifted her up and sat her between his legs with her back to his chest. She gasped slightly as he closed in around her, wrapping her legs up against her chest with his left arm as he pulled his own legs up next to hers. Finally, he pulled something out of his utility belt, a kind of square piece of shiny foil that he unfolded until it was an enormous piece of shiny foil, then wrapped it over the both of them.

His chin rested on her neck as her uncontrollable shivering began to slow.The thermal spandex that he wore over his armor was soaked through with sweat, but his body still felt delightful against her clammy skin as it radiated an intense heat all along her back, legs, and arms. As he began to rock her gently where she lay back against him, she could feel herself warming, the foil catching all the warmth and helping to cocoon her in the embrace of her beloved. Her breathing evened out as a flush spread through her whole body at the delightful sensation.

"Why are you so cold?" Robin asked quietly into her ear, and she recognized the question as an attempt to distract her from the sting of him applying burn ointment to her wrist under the blanket. She hissed at the sting anyway, then got some breath back as he finished bandaging her wound.

"I… I think I used too much of my power. It takes much of my body's energy to create starbolts, and now… I may have managed the doing over of it. I can no longer warm myself from the inside."

"It's okay now, I've got you," he assured her quietly as they embraced in the dark alley. "I can see why you might be this way though. I've never seen you do _anything_ like that. I didn't realize you had so much power."

"Truthfully Robin," and her voice was growing drowsy now that she floated in this warm caress, "I did not realize I had so much power myself. I have never had even remotely that power before, but tonight, when I thought about what would happen to you and Terra… should I fail against that fire-maker… it just… came out. I… I do not know how I—"

"Shhh," Robin shushed her gently, coaxing her away from the distress that line of thought was bringing her and returning her to the gentle drowse she'd been approaching before. Her long hair brushed against his face as she leaned her head back next to his, and her breathing leveled out the rest of the way, becoming slow and sure as she dropped off into sleep. He smiled warmly as he continued to rock her gently for a while. Inwardly he marveled at the duality she represented, power enough to dominate a battlefield wrapped up in one of the sweetest and kindest women he'd ever encountered. Either would have captured his heart, but both in one had completely ensorcelled his emotions. When he was sure she wouldn't be disturbed by the motion, he pulled out his communicator.

"_I_ may not have gotten him, but if Slade thinks he's seen the last of the Titans, he's got another thing coming," Robin muttered to himself as he got his arm out from under the blanket and flipped open his communicator. As soon as he was sure he wasn't being jammed anymore, he triggered an auto call to the fire department for a full response to the growing inferno just down the street. With everyone evacuated to their homes or shelters, the completely dead and empty office buildings and storefronts would have had to rely on their internal alarms to draw the fire department's attention, and there was no telling what Slade's comm.-jammer might have done to those. With that out of the way, however, he was free to get back to the task of commanding his team.

A quick check turned up the locator signals on Beast Boy and Cyborg, showing them to be on the other side of town at the pier, exactly where he'd told them to go. They might be able to manage it, or so he thought as he churned over what direction Slade was likely to have escaped in. That was something to check in on anyway, but the one he was really interested in talking to, Raven, was nowhere to be seen on the city-wide range his satellite uplink was scanning. He cursed quietly as he went into the logs and found the last known signal, then cursed again when this turned out to be the disaster site. He'd expected her to be back to the tower long ago, it had been hours now since they'd split up, after all. He'd been counting on it, in fact, and now he didn't even know where she was. His frustration mixed with concern, and he whished passionately that someone had remembered to give Skye a communicator/locator, knowing that to find one psychic would be to find the other. Just when he was about to give up on that plan and call the guys to start searching from their end of town, her signal popped back up again out of nothing. It was… two blocks from here?

"No way," he voiced his confusion as he put a signal through to her comm. unit. It rang quite a few times before there was an answer.

"Robin?" she asked instantly the moment the connection opened, before the picture had even come online, and Robin was thoroughly creeped out right away.

"Dang Raven, yeah, it's me, but how—"

"Skye called it," she explained hastily, as though those words would cover the exceedingly uncommon thing she'd just done.

"Yeah, okay," he decided to let that one go for the sake of expediency, "listen, there's been trouble. I need you to get back to the tower as fast as you can and fire up the city-wide search equipment. We're looking for—"

"Slade," she finished for him, and he was shocked to silence as she continued, "Because there was trouble with getting Terra back, right?" There was only fatigue and more fatigue in her voice as she told him exactly what he was about to tell her, and in fewer words. In his mind, Robin stumbled through any number of possible questions, then settled on one.

"How did you—" was as far as he got before she cut in again.

"Skye called that too. He's been a busy esper tonight." The exhaustion was really apparent in her voice now, and Robin wondered that she was even talking to him right now considering the way her face sagged with sleepiness.

"So wait now… Skye's awake?" Robin was doing his best to catch up. He'd thought a lot had happened down here, but apparently he didn't know the half of it if Raven and Skye had been running around too.

"Oh lord Robin," and there was a hint of maudlin agony in her tone as she grimaced in fatigue, "there is no way in hell I can even _begin_ to tell you what's happened to me since we split up. I don't know if I even _know_ all that's happened to me _myself_, much less if I could list it out to _someone_ _else_! So please, just let it wait for tomorrow."

"Yeah, I suppose it has been that kind of night. Anyway, I guess my next question is, what exactly are you two doing? I thought you'd be back in the tower to provide support, since each of you was distinctly down for the count when we left you at that field hospital." He was getting a better grip on the situation now, allowing his curiosity to lie silent while he tried once more to organize a search for Slade.

"Believe it or not, we're already hot on Slade's trail… or so Skye tells me. He picked up on the danger to Terra with his powers, and now he's using his ESP to track Slade down. Apparently the one eyed monster has some pretty fancy anti-psi equipment, but Skye's an old hand at sniffing out crooks, and should have the guy's location in no time—his words, not mine."

Robin was elated by the news, never having even remotely considered their newest ally capable of something like that. He'd been prepared to search every square inch of the city, have the team sleep in shifts, mobilize all the regular police support available, and maybe even call in Justice League support if it came right down to it, anything and everything to get at Slade and his hostage/weapon. He knew Slade would have all kind of protections against tracking devices and following spies, peeping satellites and even, apparently, snooping espers, and so he'd secretly despaired of actually managing to sniff out the scum. If Skye had some way of finding him out…

"Where is Skye?" he asked her excitedly as real hope once more bloomed in his heart and mind. "Is he there? Can you put him on?"

"I'd _love_ to put him on, but I'm afraid his body is a little… vacant… right now. He slipped OOB for the second stage of his search, and there's really no way I can—"

"Oh-Oh-Bee?" Robin interrupted suddenly, and Raven rubbed sleepiness from her eyes as she realized the boy wonder wasn't necessarily up on all the psi lingo.

"Out of Body—it means his spirit is out traveling around the place without his body weighing it down. It's kind of like astral projection, only he stays in this plane of existence… and you have _no idea_ what I'm talking about." This last was in response to the bewilder look she'd earned from him. "Bottom line is, he's not available for comment right now."

"So then how have _you_ been talking to him?" Robin queried, seeing the hole in that argument right away and wondering if he was being snubbed in some weird telepathic ruse.

"Telepathy," she said matter-of-factly as she continued to rub her temples. He was struck by the sudden realization that she had switched to using _both_ hands to massage her head, leaving nothing to support the communicator, and nearly choked on his own tongue before he remembered her powers. He must have been more tired than he realized. "Hold on…" she continued as her head perked up and she glanced slightly to the side, "he says he wants to talk with you."

"How—"

"Just think about him," Raven explained before he could even ask, "if you concentrate on what he looks like, his name, that kind of thing, he should be able to pick up on your mind and get in contact with you. Now if you'll excuse me, I have what's shaping up to be just a _wonderful_ migraine," and she cut the signal without further word.

Robin was momentarily furious with her, having thought he'd gotten past that kind of treatment from her some time past. It wasn't like her to just cut him off in mid conversation like that, and it wasn't until he remembered what their specific circumstances were that he found it in himself to forgive her. They were hot on Terra's trail, and he'd been distracting her from gathering her dwindling strength.

Dispelling that wasted anger with a sigh, he decided to give this whole 'telepathy' thing a shot. Gathering his concentration, he did his best to recall what Skye looked like, imagining the well built frame, with his slight height advantage and heavy muscling, the whole thing coming to mind clearly as he remembered their scuffle in the living room. He remembered the guy's voice as it rambled from snooty commentating to excessive lecturing to dead-serious business, and the picture was really shaping up. Finally, he thought about the guy's name, Skye, Skye, a rather unimaginative moniker, but no worse than a hundred other super hero names he'd heard.

"_I rather like my name_," said a voice in his head, and his body gave an involuntary jerk of surprise that caused Starfire to rouse slightly before slipping back to sleep on his chest.

"Skye?" he whispered harshly into the dark alley so as not to wake his beautiful companion.

"_No need to waist your breath Robin, I'm not anywhere near you right now. Just think what you want me to hear, please_."

"_Is this okay_?" he thought nervously, completely unsure if he was doing it right. He hadn't expected this to work, and now that it was, well… it was going to take him some time to adjust.

"_That's fine, and I commend you on your expert signaling. I was able to find your mind with little trouble. … I'm sorry, is this bothering you_?" Skye asked the last with a genuine concern that Robin couldn't hear so much as he could feel, and that he could tell this freaked him out further.

"_It's… I just…_" Robin's mind was muddled, but Skye somehow picked up on what his problem was right away.

"_I see. Many people are disturbed by their first real telepathic experience. However, you've already had a few with me, so I don't see why this one should be any different_?" As Robin began to calm down, he noticed the difference in the Skye he was talking to vs. the one he had met earlier. As he answered the question, he couldn't help but marvel at how polite and withdrawn the guy had become, and he realized that this was only one of many faces Skye had shown so far.

"_I'm better now, really. I did get a taste of this before, but you were, y'know, in the room with me, like, right there. This long distance stuff is just a little more… out there._" He thought with much more clarity now that he had himself under control. As he continued to observe this weird presence in his mind, he noticed even more, specifically that Skye seemed… not all there, or something.

"_Okay, sure, whatever_," Skye dismissed him rather shortly, as though distracted by something else, then continued, "_I understand you had something you wanted to speak to me about_?"

"_Umm… right. I need to know that you can really catch Slade_," he thought when he remembered his previous excitement at Skye's potential.

"_Close your eyes and I'll give you a show, then you can decide for yourself._" Skye made the statement with that same distraction, not at all arrogantly, but more as though he couldn't spare the concentration of a more complicated assurance. Noting this, Robin closed his eyes as requested.

There was a moment of darkness where he saw only the inside of his eyelids, but Skye did not keep him waiting long. With a burst of light, an image came into focus, and suddenly Robin was flying ten feet off the ground at break-neck speeds through the dark, empty city streets. He experienced terrible vertigo for a moment as he adjusted to the startling view, his mind's perception unwilling to believe his body's assurances that they were sitting still. He adjusted quickly however, and curiosity began to rise in his mind as he got a better look at what was happening.

"_This is a very dumbed-down version of what I'm seeing right now. I trailed a tracer I stuck on Slade's earlier means of conveyance to an alley near that battlefield you just escaped from. From there I managed to pick up a new trail, and I'm following it now. If I seem a bit distracted, it's because the countermeasures he's using are… difficult to deal with_." Skye explained with a businesslike, detached efficiency as the view twined around corners, through alleys, into warehouses and back into the streets, seemingly at random.

"_My god, who would have thought he could cover so much ground? It's only been about twenty minutes since he was standing right next to me._" Robin was understandably shocked as the view sped around at incredible speeds, the image swishing through one place after another as it buzzed through the city.

"_This view doesn't trace his exact trail, it picks up on the disturbance in the transdimensional ether caused by the resonance of his artificial mind shields. That probably doesn't mean anything to you, so suffice to say that it's really, really, hard to track but will eventually lead me right to him_." Once again, Skye was more distracted than arrogant about the whole thing, and if it was really as hard as he claimed, Robin could understand why. That settled in his mind, he opened his eyes again, and the image vanished, his stomach turning as he seemed to come to a sudden halt in the alley.

"_Okay, you've convinced me. I just have to warn you to be careful. Slade's changed, he's equipped himself with firearms and he definitely knows how to use them. When you face him, he's likely to try and use Terra as a hostage against you, so be certain to disable her somehow beforehand. I'm counting on you guys, and if you need help, I can send Beast Boy and Cyborg as backup._" Robin was solemn as he tried to think of anything else he should warn this guy about. He was hung up momentarily by the question of just how much Skye already _knew_, like he'd _know_ it would be Robin calling or like he'd _known_ Terra was in trouble, but he got over this quickly too. Not, however, before Skye could shock the pants off him with his next statement.

"_Robin, I think you've got the wrong idea about what I'm about to do here. As far as I'm concerned, this is a rescue mission only. Considering the kind of shape Raven and I are in after this endless nightmare, I also consider it a mission against all odds and beyond any reasonable hope of success_."

"_What are you saying_?" Robin thought, suddenly horrified by the idea that his faith had been misplaced and that they didn't have the opportunity he'd imagined.

"_I'm saying I intend to do the one thing anyone who needs victory against all odds should always do when the chips are down. … I'm going to cheat_." With this final statement, Skye's presence faded from his mind, leaving behind a hint of humor under a towering stack of calm self confidence, the lingering feelings messing with Robin's head a little as he came fully back to the here and now.

He pulled his arms back under the blanket, wrapped them around his sleeping beauty, and placed all worry from his mind as best he could. This was going to come down to just those two, and if Skye was going to cheat, then the only thing that could be of even slight concern is whether or not they were good enough to not get caught with the trump up their sleeve.

This was his final thought on the subject before the fire trucks and medical workers arrived in their loud, flashy manner, waking Starfire from her repose with a grumbling murmur.

"Robin?" she asked weakly, even frailer sounding than before.

"It's okay Star, our ride just arrived. I've arranged for Terra to be taken care of," a white lie, but one she wasn't likely to remember, "so you can go back to sleep."

"Wake me… when she gets back…" she requested as Robin pulled himself out from under her.

"No problem," he said as he wrapped the thermal foil the rest of the way around her and hefted her into his arms. God willing, they'd all be awake and waiting for those two to return victoriously. As for himself, he found his feelings were not nearly so conflicted and desperate as they'd been with Slade around, and he was more than willing to leave it in the competent hands of his friends. He had only to feel the way Starfire began to shiver again without him under the blanket with her to know exactly where he was needed most.

(Raven)

There comes some point where overall fatigue surpasses any descriptive adjective and becomes a force unto itself. Raven had reached this point some time ago, and was now wallowing in the experience of this force, one she could have lived her entire life quite happily without encountering. The call from Robin had been a not so welcome interruption in her continuing effort to keep her eyes open as she sat miserably on the shaped stone platform Slade had abandoned in the alley. Of particularly unpleasant note from the whole episode was the way the clock in her communicator reminded her of what ungodly hour it was that she was still awake, even after the hell she'd weathered tonight. Of course, with this thought came the self-admonishment, for she'd _seen_ hell, several of them, and this wasn't so bad in comparison.

"Skye? Progress Report?" she requested both mentally and out loud without conviction as a way to momentarily break the monotonous haze of muddled thoughts and slippages into unconsciousness that her world had become. Though she knew it to be quite the useless gesture, she also turned to address the question to the empty shell sitting and leaning back against a nearby building.

"_Close. I'm very close, so you should get ready. We won't have much time to make our move once I get a fix on them_." His mental tone was distracted, and considering the obscene amount of information his brain was processing as it plied the ether, she was impressed he could spare enough concentration for that much.

"Yes, of course." Without meaning to, she'd transmitted a big taste of what was percolating beneath her surface thoughts, a clear effect of her fatigue. Skye noticed instantly, and she could feel his progress slow as he drew much more concentration away and toward her. She began to curse in a deep part of her mind as she realized she'd done exactly what she'd been trying to avoid: distract him from his rescue efforts.

"_Raven_!" he snapped irritably into her mind, more disappointed than anything else. The feeling had time to fade away before he continued, leaving his tone completely empty. "_Listen, I get that you want to rescue Terra, so you've been suffering in silence despite the extent of your fatigue, but really, why didn't you say something? Do you really think we can pull this stunt off if you're dead on your feet_?"

"Can you honestly do anything about it? The way I see it, I have my choice between this, or the migraine that forced wake-up you use brings along for the ride. I chose what I'd rather have." If her cold voice could be said to have any emotion at all, it would have been petulance. She was incredibly annoyed that he seemed to be paying more concern to her than Terra.

"_Please, I know better than to try that ability on someone in less than an emergency situation. I had something completely different in mind, and I would have already implemented it if I'd know you were this far gone_." There wasn't a person alive who would have attributed even the barest aspect of emotion to Skye's tone, and Raven was forced to wonder if he was intentionally icing his soul or if this was another side effect of the lifedrain.

"Okay, do whatever you want. As long as we get my friend back, I don't care," Raven dismissed responsibility, too tired to be as stubborn as she secretly wanted to be. She didn't take it at all well that this guy was getting bossy all of a sudden, but she couldn't be sure if this was an effect of her fatigue, or if she was genuinely pissed off about something. Then again, her general resistance had been worn down so far, she couldn't even bring herself to really worry about this. The miasmic fog of exhaustion was rising like a choking blanket over her reasoning faculties, and for the time being she submitted to the one who seemed to know what was going on.

"_It's simple really_," Skye wasted no time as his attention shifted back to his search, "_just think of whatever it is that you would normally do to wake up, whatever your favorite way of starting the morning is, for example, and then tell _him."

Raven nearly asked what he meant, but his attention was gone again before she could manage, as she was left staring at Skye's empty body, speechless, clueless, and fucking seriously tired. She almost asked out loud who the hell 'him' was supposed to be, when a sudden presence at her side announced itself with a warm rubbing sensation and a gentle mewing. Her mind stuttered on tired legs… that _couldn't_ be it. She thought about it for another long moment, then smiled in almost manic amusement, because of COURSE that was it. It was just one of those nights.

"Okay buddy," she said out loud to the almost mystically black form of the feline next to her, "I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. What do I have to loose, really?" The cat simply stared at her expectantly, as if telling her that it was her time that was being wasted, not his own. She shook her head in further disbelieving amusement.

"Alright, Benvolio. What I could really use to wake me up right now would be a mug of tea. Not just any tea now, but a special blend I've been experimenting with for a while now. Can you take alchemical dictations?" Raven was so struck by the hilarity of this situation that she didn't even flinch when the cat nodded at her gravely, as though her question was perfectly natural, hell, as though it _understood_ her words.

She was, of course, lying through her teeth in an uncontrollably wild attempt to let out the stress that had managed to mount ever higher behind her façade of calm indifference, but one couldn't be entirely she was even aware of this herself as she began to whimsically read out the formula for a ultra-gourmet tea blend she'd found in an old book once upon a time. It was as though someone else was talking out of her mouth for this moment in time, and later, she would find this memory exceptionally disturbing.

It was amazing how her mind cleared as she thought of the ingredients, having gone over them longingly a hundred times in the past as she wondered what such a brew would taste like. Extensive research had shown that three of the leaf species she needed were extinct, and that the rest would cost, for enough to make a single pot, more than she was given in expenses allowance for a year of serving as a Teen Titan. None the less, she detailed the formula, including the extinct species, as well as the preparation process all the way down to how long the leaves stayed in the brew and the specific type of spring water she preferred for her tea. As she brought her description to a close, she couldn't help but feel a little ashamed for being such a bitch about this, but she was just too damn tired to take any of this seriously anymore.

For his part, the cat listened intently to her explanation of what she desired, continuing to stare at her piercingly until long after she'd finished. The stare wore on, and she actually began to come back to herself and feel _real_ guilt for the way she was acting. There was the inexplicable urge to apologize and give the cat an actually possible item to fetch, or whatever it was supposed to do for her, when it broke the stare and dissolved into a cloud of shadow that evaporated into thin air. She yelped slightly at its sudden disappearance, and then felt a sting of remorse through the numbing veil of her exhaustion. She'd driven the poor animal away with her baseless whimsy.

She was just beginning to muddle her way through planning an explanation to Skye as to why his cat had skipped out on her after he'd graciously arranged for it to give its mysterious aid, when the animal in question returned. She yelped again as it manifested more like a whirlwind of shadow this time, its unnaturally pitch black coloration standing out even against the dark background of the unlit alleyway. As an unearthly aroma reached her nose, her brain was pierced with a spike of clarity she'd not felt in what seemed like hours, and she realized it had not returned empty… pawed… or whatever. She fell to her knees then in an almost frantic rush to see, smell, and _taste_ what the cat had dragged in.

Sitting in a nondescript tan ceramic mug next to the regally posed feline was a fluid of nondescript brown coloration. The smell that came wafting from the hot liquid was anything but nondescript, generating in her mind memories of every visit she'd ever made to a tea store, a magic shop, or any of the many other places she'd enjoyed being. In fact, the wafting fumes from this potion stimulated her mind to such a bubbling happiness that a tear ran down her cheek and stress cracks began to reach down the sides of the buildings to either side as spider web fine networks of black energy spread lighting-quick across them. Damn, just the _smell_.

As she lifted the mug into her hands, she could feel the warmth of the brew spread through them. Holding the cup to her face, she took a deep breath straight from the surface, and it was like she'd gotten a full night's sleep in one exquisite inhalation. Unable to hold out any longer, she took a greedy, testing sip from the edge, her curiosity overcome by her common sense at the last instant to keep her from gulping it down.

Bliss. Liquid bliss. That first exquisite taste hit her tongue like a livewire, and she was forced to hang on for the ride as its powerful effect had its way with her nervous system. She was inundated by the sensation spreading out from her tongue and sizzling along her synapses, settling a calm euphoria over her brain even as it lanced flash fires of delightful tingling along her nerves to every part of her body. As she knelt on the cold alley pavement, tears flowed freely down her face while chips from the walls and ground began to shoot out in randomly interspersed barrages, not unlike the leaping of popping popcorn. It was as these miniscule projectiles began to ricochet off of anything and everything around her that she finally jerked her mind off the high and began to squeeze everything back under control.

With expert breathing techniques and a few long-practiced mental warding spells, she nailed down the emotional outburst with little more than a shake of her head and a sharp wincing as she leaned over hard forward and pounded her fist on the pavement. Gritting her teeth with the effort, she slowly ground the rest of the explosive sensations away, willing them to be silent with every fiber of her self control. For good measure, she finished it all off by using an ancient meditation technique to accelerate her metabolism, holding the effect for several long moments until every last vestige of the feelings had been burnt away to nothing. She was left a shivering mess, huddled under her regally spread cloak as she struggled for air on her hands and knees.

Almost grudgingly, she looked up at the mug where it sat completely intact on the ground, that terrifying liquid steaming in its unthreatening way, concealing its terrible power even as the nose-numbingly delightful scent blared out its siren's call. She felt the immediate and almost undeniable desire to take another taste, to simply lie down on the ground and let that burning euphoria run its full course through her brain, and she reacted in the only way she could. With a growl of anger, she snapped the mug up by its handle and flung it down the alley, a trail of showering tea almost invisible in the night before it shattered twenty feet down the way. She was left breathing in short gasps as the stinging desire for more began to burn at the back of her throat and force small muscle spasms all over her body.

"Meaow?" said Ben inquisitively, striding forward to sit just in front of her and look up the few inches into her eyes where she was still keeled over. The look could only be described as smug.

"_You_…" Raven muttered darkly, then relinquished that building anger with a sigh and continued in neutral/sad whispering, "Don't you know better than to grant someone their wildest and most whimsical desire? People are _never_ careful what the wish for…" and she trailed out into silence as the grip of that fluid began to tighten on her throat. She was literally sweating through her costume with the desire to taste it once more. She clenched her eyes in pain as she began to wonder if one of those extinct tea species had been related to poppies (plant antecedent of opium, cocaine, etc), the instant, ironclad addiction being more than enough to convince her of this.

"Purrrr," the cat began to vibrate with that incredible sound they're capable of. Raven's eyes were drawn to him with that sound, and she glanced up just in time to see it vibrate from its unnatural, painfully black solid form into a cloud of black fog once more. Before she could do anything, the fog flew straight at her and enveloped her face in inky darkness. She was no stranger to the dark, but this sudden blackout compounded with her exhaustion and the pain from that drug to bring on a panic. She reached up to claw the cloud off her face, but couldn't get a grip, feeling only a cool mist and her own skin. She was about to blast it with her power when the attack came to an end. The mist was gone, and she knew exactly where.

She could feel that same sensation again, like something furry was rubbing against her from the inside, possible one of the most surreal and uncomfortable things she'd ever experienced. It began to move quickly from her head down her body to her toes, then faded completely. In a moment, the cat welled back up again out of nothing, forming into solidity once more. Raven felt completely better.

"Okay," Raven finally said, after almost a minute of pulling herself together, getting up off the ground, and wiping the stupefied look off her face, "and that, Ben, officially makes you the coolest entity I've _ever_ met."

The cat preened at the compliment, then became a pool of shadow, twirled up to her feet, spiraled up her legs and body, then reformed on her shoulder. He rubbed his body against the side of her face affectionately, effortlessly keeping his balance. Raven was pleasantly surprised, not only by the comforting presence of the increasingly friendly feline, but by its mystical ability to keep the perch without digging in claws or imposing more than a negligible weight on her shoulder.

"Honestly, how did a guy like Skye come across a being like you?" she wondered out loud as she took stock of what that little episode had cost her. The drink had worked, kind of, because whatever else, she was no longer tired. With the cat's help, the addiction was also broken, though she couldn't imagine how it had managed that. She didn't know how it had produced the impossible beverage either, but she didn't let either lacking bother her. If she could just get a minute to collect herself…

"_Raven, I've got them, its time to go_."

Wouldn't you know it?

En Route

"I've tracked them to a nondescript warehouse in the industrial sector," Skye briefed Raven telepathically from the dubious comfort of her pocket dimension as they hurtled through the sky. "The building doesn't seem to be much of a base, more like a temporary safe house, it would seem they're just stopping there for medical purposes. We needed to get there as quickly as possible, so I held off on a closer examination."

"Okay," Raven was rather indifferent in her response, eager to get this whole operation over with and, as before, more than willing to let Skye do all the worrying. She was still rather fried by this night from hell, and now that the end was in sight, she was basically running on autopilot as Skye led her around by the psychic hand. A small part of herself wondered how in the name of all sane and good things she'd gone from hating his guts to trusting him with her life and the life of her helpless friend Terra, but that voice was drowned by the undeniable comfort of the assuring force with which he directed her toward Slade. She was definitely in a passenger seat state of mind right now.

"Skye, we'll be there in about three minutes," she updated him distractedly, more than positive he could tell exactly how long it would take them to get there. "I was just wondering… a few quick questions?" She couldn't place where this urge to speak with him came from, but she couldn't deny it either. It was like some part of her couldn't believe that tonight had happened, and that she was now seeking confirmation of some kind.

"It's better to live unrestrained by questions never voiced," he answered obliquely, sounding just as distracted as her. Between the two of them, there might have been about half a mind participating in this conversation. "That said, there are things that just can't be answered in a few minutes. So shoot."

"How did your cat do that?" was her instantaneous response. She had her list ready, at that was at the top.

"Short answer: he manipulates matter at the molecular level," he responded promptly and simply, and Raven did not fail to notice that he hadn't actually told her anything at all. "Long answer would take a few hours. Next."

"How did you do that with your cloths earlier? That's been bothering the hell out of me." She decided that prying for detailed answers was less important than distracting herself from the flight of butterflies in her intestines, which she finally realized was why she'd started this conversation in the first place.

"Synthar smart fibers. Self repairing, self cleaning, color changing, self resizing… in other words the only set of cloths you'll ever need. By stimulating the memory fiber with that rubbing motion, I bound it back together. By giving it a good snap or three, I separated all of the already loosened impurities in the fibers, including blood, grime, oil, stone dust, sweat, you know—everything. If I wanted, I could manipulate its microchip command interface and change what I'm wearing into virtually any other style imaginable."

"Sounds like you'd really never need more than one," Raven commented idly as she imagined what it must be like to go through life with all the cloths you'll ever need on you at once. She actually began to envy him a little as she recalled how much she loathed laundering all those bodysuits and capes in her closet.

"Which is fortunate considering how much a single set costs. Next question?"

"Oh, umm, why did you send Ben searching for those sunglasses of yours? It seems more than a little…" Raven trailed off as she realized how offensive what she was going to say really sounded, but there was no way a sensitive could hide that kind of thing from another sensitive.

"Anal? Yes, I can see how it could come across that way, but I and these shades have simply been through too much together for me to give them up after a little spill off the side of an office building. I've had these through thick and through thin, ever since I purchased them from that experimental industrial materials company for that exorbitant prototype price tag. Did you know that these things are made of a dimensionally stabilized super polymer that can resist heat, pressure, and kinetic force far in excess of that which things like battleship armor can? Would be doing myself quite a disservice leaving them behind.

Raven was intrigued by this, quite effectively dispelling her doubt with wonder at this guy's unending supply of fascinating dialogue. She fell to silence and became so absorbed in her own thoughts that she was actually startled a minute later when he called her down to a slanting metal rooftop of some kind of factory in the industrial district.

Factory Rooftop

"_There are eight security cameras that cover a complete field of view around the building, pressure sensors on the roof, and motion and heat sensors in every room. There are also laser tripwire grids in full array to catch any and all approach to the area and alert the systems_." Skye spoke slowly as his OOB spirit passed with wraithly impudence through Slade's formidable security system.

"Damn," muttered Raven darkly where she crouched by his once again vacant body a few buildings over. "Sounds like Slade wants to know everything, all the way down to if a fly _breaks_ _wind_ anywhere near his building."

The industrial sector, like most of Jump, somehow managed to stay shiny and new, so it was little trouble to hide on the chilly metallic roof, though she couldn't see how Skye had managed to concentrate enough go OOB while lying flat out on the ice sheet this thing became at night. All around were the reaching ultra-filtered smokestacks and towering spherical chemical containers that dominated this part of the city, and she strained her eyes to glare through the moonlit night at the building they had to get her friend out of.

"Anyway," she continued when he didn't respond to her dry attempt at humor, "I'm open to suggestions on how to get in." the place was a fortress of security, and it was only an _emergency_ base. It led her to once more question how they had ever beaten him back. Oh yeah… Terra betrayed him didn't she?

"Ahhh…" Skye gasped unintelligibly in either pain or pleasure as his spirit returned to his body, the limp form jerking upward somewhat as it was reoccupied. "Like I told Robin," he answered her question as he pulled himself off the cold metal roof, his voice sounding far weaker than she would have preferred, "I plan to cheat… _vigorously_."

"Okay Mr. Dirty Play, lay it on me… what's your plan?" She had had enough ambiguous reassurance. Now was time to see if he could actually put up.

"I call it 'Grand Theft Hostage.' We're rather simply going to sneak in, snatch the girl's empty husk, and split out of there without Slade becoming any the wiser. The cheating part is just beautiful though, and here it is," he mumbled out calmly but tiredly as he reached down at his gun belt. Fiddling for a moment, he brought out a nondescript looking box and set it on his thy as he leaned back along the roof's mild incline, holding himself up on one propped elbow. "This is what you might call 'a completely unfair technological advantage.'"

"Okay, I'll bite," she muttered without enthusiasm, disgusted that he was bothering with showmanship at this ungodly hour of the morning, "What is it?" In truth, she wasn't all that annoyed, everyone dealt with the mind-breaking strain in his or her own way after all.

"This is an IDP micro infiltration computer. In moments, his security system will be mine to toy with as I please. It's almost sad how utterly little chance he has against this tactic… but only _almost_. I mean, even the most cutting edge stuff in the _greater_ _galaxy_ is _generations_ behind this little baby. Watch and see, and get ready to spirit us in there." Skye spoke with the oddest hint of humor, even as it became very much apparent that he was having trouble moving and talking, and probably also breathing.

Raven leaned the rest of the way forward and prepared herself, too tired to be skeptical, saving all her energy for what, if there was any god anywhere, would be the last big push of the night. She was more than a little disappointed then by the next thing Skye said.

"Hmmmm," he hummed out in very mild frustration, "just as I suspected."

"_What is it now_?" Raven snapped out, and the roof beneath her got a new set of intricately interwoven scorings as her power reacted to the burst of emotion. She couldn't stand the delay any longer, the stresses of the night building to this one ungodly crescendo within her. It was as though she could already feel Terra safely in her arms as she whisked what was left of the broken girl away from the living nightmare she had herself condemned her to. The deepest root of her anxiety came to light in her mind at that same instance, and as Skye explained himself, she felt the anger leave her with the realization.

"As I thought, he has no hard line into the building, just in case someone was to try exactly what I'm doing right now. If he thinks I'm going to let a little thing like a lack of wires stop me…" Skye continued, but Raven's mind was elsewhere. There was a rushing emptiness between her ears, an utter numbness that had been threatening for some time, but which had only just now come out.

This night had been a travesty against her comfort zone, a continual series of blows against what she'd always considered her limits and boundaries, as well as a terror of near death experiences and an almost nonstop combat, injuries, and patchwork fixes on said injuries. Her body and mind were in a shambles, and it was a wonder that she was standing much less managing to keep any kind of control on her powers. She was operating now on borrowed time, a tolerance borne of the dreamlike quality this ordeal had assumed greasing her through unbearable encounter after unbearable encounter, but it couldn't last, and it was this knowledge too that combined to weigh her down. Eventually, all this was going to come up and smack her with a delayed-action breakdown of epic proportions, and all she could really think about was the guy chattering away in his half dead voice and why it was she'd been so utterly uncomfortable recently, even through the hazy gauze that shielded her from freaking about everything else that had happened.

It was simple really, she thought to herself as she watched him produce a small object and hand it to his feline companion, who vanished into nothingness as quickly as he'd appeared. The question that had been nagging at her, the real one she'd not had the guts to ask him, and for which reason she'd plied him with nothing questions to which she'd received nothing answers, was simply: why? This guy didn't know Terra, had never met her, and had only second and third had concepts of what she was like through his ESP. He had nothing to do with her loss, had nothing to do with the Titan's gloriously horrifying failure to protect her, and had absolutely no reason to destroy himself in the pursuit of her salvation. Why? Why was he doing this for Terra, and for the Titans?

Her meandering contemplations were yanked back down to the present when a heavy gloved hand tapped her on the knee. The cold steel touch snapped her back into herself, and she glanced with a start at Skye, as though he'd just jumped out and shouted 'BOO'. The look that he fixed on her was incomprehensible behind his recovered sunglasses, but the feeling he transmitted was clear as day. He felt her distress, her confusion, and her pain, and he urged her to hold it all off just a little longer. She understood immediately, so, reaching down to the last dregs of her strength, she bolted up all that crap behind a cast iron door within her mind, and then nodded when she was fee and clear again. Time enough to fall apart when Terra's body was back in their hands.

"His system is mine, lets get this done," he responded to her nod, his voice gone completely to business as he dragged himself slowly the rest of the way to his feet. Raven wasted no time, immediately taking to the air, looking back to solidify a disk of air with her power, which he was already stepping onto as though he'd expected it to be there when he stuck out his foot. She conveyed them both over to the nondescript warehouse's rooftop, looking in vain for the security features Skye had disabled, but unable to catch even a glimpse of Slade's now defunct defenses. She would never have spotted them by herself.

"_The rest of this operation is silent_," Skye 'pathed to her emotionlessly, and this time she knew it was because he'd iced his soul. The frost of utter neutrality coming off his mind was half shocking and half alluring, once again drawing a mild envy from a woman who had worked hard her whole life at doing something that was completely natural and accursed by this man. "_To ensure success, we've can't afford to make any noise whatsoever. I don't even want to hear roof dust grinding beneath your boots_."

His utterly callous instructions surprised Raven once more, but she took it in stride as she set him ever so gently on the flat, featureless rooftop. She kept herself floating to be absolutely sure not to screw up their last shot at this, then kept place just behind him as he took a few perfectly silent steps in a seemingly random direction. When he bent down and placed his hands on the roof, she knew he had something, and so she took up position above and behind him as she waited for further instruction.

"_They're below us_," he said simply, linking her through to the image he had with disturbingly easy and familiar mental tinkering. "_There are… three humanoids, one of which matches the spiritual signature of the woman we're after_."

As he continued to explain, she noticed what he was describing, a rough outline of the enormous and virtually featureless room below them coming into focus behind her eyelids. There were indeed three glowing figures occupying the room, their respective auras badly dimmed by the artificial mind shields they wore, but still distinguishable to Skye's sensitive perceptions. She noticed the iridescent yellow of Terra off to one side right away. A furious reddish-brown several yards away would have to be Slade, the mere sight of the stained and tarnished nastiness that was his soul filling her with a slight dread, and currently he seemed to be working intently on something with his back to the rest of the room. The third however… that one she didn't have a clue how to interpret. The mere existence of her inquiry was communicated instantly to Skye through the link, which she'd unknowingly let grow quite wide, its power difficult to judge with the utter lack of emotion off of Skye to gauge it by.

"_The third figure… hmmm. That one obviously isn't human, probably one or another of the vegoid species by the particular shade of the outer aura_," he answered her unspoken question in that classic lecturing tone, his lack of anything like urgency or nervousness beginning to grate against Raven's ability to control her own pent up baggage from the night. "_Ahh… I know who that is, actually. It's another of the ones I was after… but of all the beings to find on a night like this… and Slade's 'prisoner'… humph, the arrogant bastard_."

"_Mind telling me what's going on… like WHY WE ARENT SAVING TERRA YET_?" Raven's power began to bake around her body as the rush was once again threatening to break down her walls and overcome her, but a cool rush of power from Skye quelled it with ease. That bastard just—

"_Did you just-_?" she snapped into his mind incredulously, then, "_If you expect me to stand by and let you do that to me_—"

"_The only thing I expect is for you to execute your half of this rescue. Our window of opportunity is closing rapidly. Slade is currently suturing his own arm wound, and once he's completed this undeniably painful task, any chance of secreting away your valued friend will evaporate. Act now Raven. Rescue her_."

The calculating ice in his mental tone washed away the phantom of outrage she'd managed to drum up, and she allowed herself mild, neutral grumbling about what an asshole he was without any feelings at all as she wasted absolutely no time lighting gently on the roof and kneeling down to press her power into the surface. This was a situation where, even if Skye's power hadn't just sucked her dry, she'd have had to concede her anger to how utterly right he was.

Inside the fantastically vast and nearly vacant warehouse, a tendril of shadow indistinguishable from the reaching blackness of the poorly lit interior crawled down steel support beams and dripped down to one of the lonesome lamps that glared like huge eyes at the room below. From the lamp, a tiny strand of dark reached down like a single thread of spider's silk, floating gently downward until it landed on the nondescript chair in which the blond woman sprawled out and dozed lifelessly, limp as a rag doll. As she worked at the unfamiliar effort of coordinating her extraction through the lens of Skye's ESP, a thought occurred to her, and she transmitted a question as she finished getting a grip on Terra's chair.

"_Skye, the other one, you're after her, right_?" she asked him, her tone as distant due to her efforts as his had been earlier. "_Shouldn't I grab that one too_?"

"_Oh no Raven, this is actually working out better than I could have hoped,_" Skye responded, just a hint of feeling creeping into his voice, as though he couldn't help but feel amused by what he was thinking, or more likely, like he couldn't maintain his power strongly enough to drown that out any more. "_Those two were meant for one another—I mean the more I consider the situation, the more advantageous it seems. That one, I've encountered her before, and her cunning is nothing short of legendary, though her actual abilities are above and beyond even what the stories suggest. Even now she weaves an entangling web around Slade, baiting him into one of her famous traps with the expertly acted possum role she's playing right now. With luck, those two will take each other out of the picture long enough for us to deal with the others. Leave them to one another… it would be giving Slade exactly what he deserves. Now grab the girl so we can run, it'll only take him another twelve seconds to tie off those sutures_."

Raven didn't need to be told twice, and with a rush of her power, the chair, woman and all, was sucked into a pool of shadow on the floor, vanishing silently into the darkness.

(Slade)

As Slade finished drawing out the last pull of surgical thread through the once gaping wound in his arm, he tied off the slack with long-practiced motions and snipped of the trailing edge with the clamp he'd been using to handle the micro needle. He was no stranger to the stinging pain of performing surgical procedures on himself without the benefit of anesthesia, but it still took intense concentration to get the job done correctly though the ache. So, as he replaced his forearm guard with a new one from his stockpiles, he was finally able to turn his mind to other matters.

The girl was quickly outgrowing her usefulness. Now that she was no longer a surprise to any of his enemies, now that she was badly injured and almost totally used up, and now that he realized just how little he felt like having the little waif around, he was running out of reasons to keep her. He'd been disappointed by the deterioration in her combat ability during his not so tender ministrations, though he'd expected some attrition to her powers, he'd been unwilling to consider their intent in the light of how pleased he was by his plans to make her useful again. Certainly he could build her muscle and endurance back up with little trouble, but he'd been landed with a much more amusing target of his efforts unexpectedly, the prospects for what he'd be able to do with the alien far more intriguing than building up his old toy. Truthfully, he'd probably just donate her to Blood's tender mercies until it was time for her farewell performance for the Titans. Yes, that was most likely the best use of her empty shell at this point, and would provide the final ultimate insult to both the little whore who'd backstabbed him and all of her pathetic friends. He'd have to make sure and get plenty of photos to flood the internet and maximize the effect of the closing move of his queen piece.

This was his last thought before he stood and turned back to the room in general. There was a long pause. With a flying leap, he was back at his work table in an instant, jamming his hand down on a large protruding button there. When nothing happened, i.e. the security system _didn't_ lockdown the building, he went from sputtering surprise to blind fury in record time. As the red haze overtook his vision and he began a mad dash for the roof access stairs, he pressed a button on his belt, triggering his robots to full alert status, a process he'd made sure was completely independent of his security system. He was at the stairway inside of ten seconds, and was taking them in threes as he raced toward the obvious point of access for this theft, blood pounding through his body as he lost himself to a killing lust. No one stole from him.

(Skye)

"_Raven, our chances of escaping with our lives decrease sharply with every second's delay_," he felt compelled to remind her as he ticked off the seconds on his internal clock. Everything was always more clear when he'd iced his soul, and the prosecution of this operation was no different, the window he estimated for a success here swinging shut as every instant washed by. It was so clear that they should already be gone that it was hard for him to comprehend, in this state of mind, why she was hesitating.

"Terra… Terra what did he do to you?" she mumbled out loud, violating another one of his essential directives. The moment she'd lifted the broken shell of a person off the rickety old chair, she'd gone to pieces, falling apart in a way that he was hesitant to forcibly curtail. While he knew exactly the course of action that would carry them all to safety in the most expedient manner possible, the small part of his humanity he hadn't had enough power to suck away to nothingness screamed out that there were certain things he couldn't disregard with any hope of ever being forgiven. Thus he was stuck in a most uncharacteristic moment of indecision, suspended between the knowledge that their lives were slipping away like grains of sand in an hourglass and a dull certainty that there was no way for him to motivate Raven without pushing her past her breaking point and eradicating any hope of her trusting him ever again. He'd been lucky so far, but without her and her friends on his side, the universe was doomed.

"Raven… we need to go. I begging you, though I can't express the depth of my urgency right now," and he couldn't, his voice, speaking out loud himself now, as emotionless as a poorly synthesized robotic drone, "I'm begging you to please get us out of here. We need to save your friend, and the chances of that happening become relatively miniscule if we're still here six seconds from now. Five… four… three…" Skye pulled out his sidearm at three seconds and prepared for what he felt coming.

There was no change in Raven, neither mental nor outwardly, and Skye knew better than to expect much considering what he sensed from her. Right now, for whatever reason, she was a guilt taco with pain filling, and there was nothing he could do short of raping her emotions that would snap her out of it right now. Considering this, he steeled himself against the flaring of his danger sense as two dozen spiritless metallic constructs registered on the peripherals of his clairvoyance at the same time.

Closing from every direction at once, they leapt up the sides of the building and launched themselves over the threshold of the roof and high into the air, acquiring their targets below with audible beeping sounds and the illumination of glowing eyes. Skye whipped out his pistol and opened fire without mercy, lancing out with pinpoint accuracy to fry five of them like giant metal skeet before they could reach the highest point of their converging leaps. As they trained their own weapons at the three below, his deadly streaks of solid, hot light continued to lick upward like pillars of purging fire, each one annihilating the central control unit of another robot in a shower of exploded metal and fried circuitry. At the last possible instant, Skye kicked Raven and Terra to the side with a powerful leg sweep that slid them over the rough rooftop and under an overhanging ventilation duct, then leapt to the side himself as a dozen laser pistols turned their previous position into a flaming, melted hole in the roof.

The lasers started to track him, following after him at full burn and creating an expanding melted line in the building's flat roof, so he continued to evade with wide sweeping rolls that would keep the two women safe while still allowing him a moment or two to strike out at the descending robots. As both the destroyed junk heaps and the still functioning automatic soldiers began to slam into the roof with clanging thumps, Skye took cover behind the building' roof access stairwell outlet just in time to avoid being filleted by a new battery of lasers that still managed to dig deep gouges into the boxlike structure that housed the stairs. He was about to leap on top of the tiny building to continue his rather hopeless counterattack when ever remaining robot on the roof suddenly slowed to quietude, and he was coldly perplexed as he was able to sense their weapons loosing charge as they stood down. His answer came quickly as he sensed a blazing emotional beacon tearing up from just beneath him on the stairwell, the advanced mind shield he was using completely failing to hide the intense fury Slade projected as he reached the top of the building. Skye crouched away from the side of the little structure the doorway was on as it was kicked open with undue force by the furious villain that had just arrived to completely annihilate any feasible chance of them getting out of this.

Slade took the last few steps onto the roof with a slow caution that belied the fury boiling under his synthetic mind shield, and Skye's powers searched furiously through the infinite realms of the possible for any way they could come out of this relatively intact. As he worked through the options at his disposal with a methodical exactness unhindered by the hopelessness he wasn't currently capable of feeling, Slade's emotional state and demeanor took a surprising turn where he stood on the opposite side of the stairway access hut. He'd seen Terra and Raven.

Nothing in the near future suggested an immediate danger to them, so Skye hunkered down to sense carefully through the situation and wait for the right moment to act. As of yet, Slade was clueless to his very existence, and that was his greatest advantage at this point. However, this advantage would serve him poorly in the face of his two dependent handicap, inferiority of pure numbers, and the fact that his laser pistol was down to its last charge (which would do little against the ceramate plate and fractal polymer armor the man sported so sinisterly). Honestly, unless something happened from the mysteriously altered resource Raven currently represented, he didn't foresee any good end to this.

This was his last thought on the matter before Slade began to talk.

(Raven) moments ago

The instant Raven recombined Terra's particles into this phase of existence, expelling the chair and its occupant from the subdimensional pocket she'd slid them through, something went wrong in her head. All the pent up confusion, anger, fear, and pain died an instantaneous and pitiful death the very moment she got a close look at what was left of Terra. The bulwarks she'd thrown up against it all dissolved, the buffering Skye had added with his draining evaporated, and her mind was left defenseless against the onslaught of the knowledge lying before her. Somehow, through all the warnings Skye had granted and all the knowledge she herself had gained through earlier encounters, she'd still managed to block out just what Terra had become, to isolate herself from realizing this, what was hitting her right now. Terra was gone.

She couldn't rightly conceive of what lie she'd unconsciously comforted herself with up until she was faced with the utter reality of Terra's state, but it was nothing compared to what had actually afflicted the girl. What she knew to be a friend, the essence of mind and spirit that formed the entity Terra, was simply nonexistent in the shell of flesh she'd previously associated it with. To a sensitive like her, such a discrepancy came as a shock, the absence of the soul she knew in the physical body it was supposed to occupy hitting her right in the brain, especially bad because she had somehow managed to avoid expecting it and had never encountered anything remotely like it before. As the first touch to the shell's skin gave her access past the mind shield, she had no choice but to face the truth.

What was left in the place of reasoning faculties and urgent objectives was an echoing void of silence interrupted by an endlessly recursive loop of thought that drowned out all of her awareness and left her alone with nothing but crushing, suffocating guilt. She felt entirely responsible for allowing things to reach such a state, the mindless lump of flesh before her a symbol of her own inability to hold trust or protect loyalty. She heard nothing, saw nothing, and knew nothing but her own failure, the buzzing of the outside world gone to static around her. Even when she was knocked aside, she stirred but a moment before that blank face caught her mind again in the cycle of blinding, deafening guilt.

That was, until a certain voice ripped her out of her reverie by association with pure emotional explosion.

(Slade)

As he reached the top floor, kicked off the door, and strode purposefully the rest of the way out onto the roof, Slade felt his rage crystallize. Like coagulating blood, it solidified into a towering precipice of cold, dead nothingness that fueled the homicidal hunger in his soul. As he took in the situation on the roof, secure in the knowledge that his robots had pinned down the thieves, he caught site of the two young women and immediately focused all his attention right there. From the look of the shattered wreckage of more than half his robots, it would seem that the dark one had put up quite a fight before taking cover, but now she cowered over the remains of her pathetic friend. As the certainty of his ongoing victory combined with yet another prize to this night's collection, his mood improved substantially. He even began to feel loquacious all of a sudden as the true enormity of his own greatness occurred to him once more.

"Ah, so the young Miss Raven decided to join us again?" Slade asked the air around him rhetorically, and the girl shook with a jerk of surprise at the sound of his voice, as though she'd been oblivious to his arrival. Strange, considering all the damage she'd just done, to see her so pathetically subdued over the blank, but he let this concern pass from his mind as he wound up into full villainous tirade.

"I see you've had a chance to get reacquainted with your old dear friend, the late Miss Terra. I had a feeling you didn't fully comprehend how eloquently I'd handled her punishment before you attacked me earlier, so I suppose I'm glad that you've gotten the chance now." His voice was light and taunting, the edge of danger there as always, the unspoken threats and jeers transmitting perfectly through his tone and inflection.

"How… how could you do something so horrible to… to my friend?" Raven asked in a dead voice, not even bothering to look up at him. Her face was shaded by that hood, so he couldn't read her face either, but his imagination danced with the countenance of utterly defeated agony he expected there. She was partially psychic after all, she could truly appreciate what he'd done to the little traitor.

"Raven, dearest little Raven, you need to understand that I will do _whatever_ I please to _whomever_ I please. Not only is it within my power to do this to _you_, but I fully intend to afflict each and every one of your pathetic friends with a fate as equally justly deserved as the end of that little traitorous wench you now hold. You have all defied me beyond allowance, and you will all pay dearly for it. Now… come along quietly and accept your fate. If you make this easy on both of us, I may consider destroying you quickly so you need not see me torture your little friends later on." All through his monologue, Slade floated along the intoxicating brilliance of his success tonight, waxing through the many victories in his own mind as he spouted his, admittedly, overdramatic speech.

As he continued to observe the prey that had so haplessly wandered into his clutches once again (ignoring for mental convenience the way she'd initially circumvented his security), he noticed a subtle change in her after his words, a glowing at the edges of her form that didn't conform to anything he'd seen before. White fire began to dance languidly across her cloak and down her arms, surrounding her in a bubble of iridescent flames that seemed to invest her with their purifying light. Slade felt himself break out in an inexplicable sweat as her dark cloak began to light with a burning white light, roasting out until she was clothed head to toe in a pristinely unblemished alabaster.

"Slade, I will see to it that you never hurt one of my friends ever again," spoke an unearthly voice from the general vicinity of Raven and Terra, and Slade was immediately on full guard, hands poised to draw weapons as he continued to watch this transformation in silence. Every nerve on his body danced with the feeling of impending danger, combat reflexes trained since his first trip through boot camp coiling for immediate use as soon as he knew the nature of this threat.

The feeling of danger magnified intensely when she slowly rose to her feet, turning her pure white cloak aside to show two glowing white starbursts of flaming energy in a pit of black under her hood. Wasting no further time, Slade burst into action.

"Robots, subdue her!" he shouted to his minions, and they dutifully raised their weapons to fire on her from every direction. Before they even had a chance to strike at her, each spontaneously burst into an inferno of heatless white flame, the pure brilliance of the explosions rending the robotic antagonists into so much broken and scorched scrap metal in mere seconds. Raven never moved, her dazzling form continuing to bare slowly in on Slade. He hadn't expected much, not against this foe, but Slade never ceased to be amazed at how completely ineffective those weapons were in these situations. It was why he invested in more specialized fare to handle specific circumstances like this.

"Do you honestly seek to impress me with these antics of yours little girl?" he asked, careful not to let his fear seep into his tone as he stared down the ethereally glowing woman. "I can barely imagine what hate boils in your soul, what vicious intentions you have lined up in your pathetic attempts to punish me, but not even you can stand against me!" The questions and boasting were mostly meant to taunt and distract as he prepared to quickdraw his scrambler, but to his surprise, she responded.

"Slade," she addressed him in that unearthly voice, unexpectedly devoid of any discernable bloodlust or fury, "you seem to misunderstand what is about to happen to you. I have come to understand something," she commented calmly as she finished closing on him and stopped at about six feet away, "and with this understanding, I finally comprehend you too. I do not hate you, in fact, I feel nothing toward you at all, and if anything this makes it all the easier to do what I am about to do. You will die Slade, and with your death will end any threat to my friends. You are nothing Slade, a stain on the world and a danger to those I whish to protect, one I should have erased from existence ages ago. Prepare to die."

To Slade, the threats weren't so much frightening as they were infuriating, that anyone should talk down to him simply boggled his mind, chipping away at the feeling of invincibility he'd been riding upon in an unexpectedly severe manner. The wench thought him nothing, a piece of scum and a threat to her friends and nothing more, and for these insults… she would die right now. Without delaying another instant, Slade drew and fired his scrambler.

The invisible wave of amplified anti-psi energy rippled out in an instantaneous blast that would have scrambled Raven's neural pathways beyond any hope of repair, had it struck her at all. Instead, Slade found the space in front of him unexpectedly empty, the brightly glowing girl reappearing two feet to the left the next instant, lashing out with an energy blast that blew his weapon to bits and singed his armored glove so badly that he clutched it to his chest and dropped to a knee in pain.  
"I'm not going to fall for the same trick twice Slade, I'm not the rage driven animal I was before, after all." The woman stated as she raised her hands to strike a final blow. The utter emptiness in her every body motion and word spoke of how little it meant to her to finalize him, and the sociopath in him admired that. However, his cunning side was alive with how close his own death was, and how elegantly his last ditch gambit was about to pay out.

In a motion that couldn't have been more than an instant ahead of his own eradication, Slade pulled his backup scrambler from a holster at the small of his back and pumped off a round dead on into the unprepared mystic. After the blinding flash had pierced his one eye, his vision cleared to grant him a view to a no longer glowing, dark blue cloak with its crippled occupant kneeling on the rooftop before him. It was true… he was invincible.

"Why Raven, I suppose I should let you in on an old adage from my military days," he almost bellowed in his ecstatic desire to gloat over this crowning victory of the night. "It's been a while, but I think it went something like, why buy one when you can get two for twice the price? Rather stilted to be sure, but it does say something about the value of redundancy," he rambled on, almost dripping with the arrogance of his success, slowly advancing on Raven as he drew his custom magnum and twirled it leisurely much as Skye had done with his blaster earlier.

As he got within a single step of her and pointed his gun at her skull, fully ready to eliminate the ridiculous threat this one presented, she lifted her head to stare up at him. Her eye sighted up along the barrel of his magnum empty with some unknowable thoughts behind them. Slade fancied that they were thoughts of hate for him, despite what she'd said under the influence of that white light, or perhaps merely an attempt to resist the urge to beg for her life, but either way, it wouldn't matter in a second. As his finger tightened on the trigger, the woman's eyes flickered from his one shadowed orb and over slightly to the side, and instantly Slade knew what was about to happen. He had just enough time to pull the gun away from Raven's face before the blow landed.

A dull thud accompanied by a hot numbness spreading out like quicksilver from the base of his skull announced that he'd been quite smartly pistol-whipped. It was hardly his first experience with this kind of blow, but this one had another quality to it that he was unfamiliar with, and as his body seized in response to this additional, extraneous force, he was forced to consider that this was why the armor plate on the back of his neck had not prevented his increasing paralysis. Though the world was becoming quite faint, Slade refused to give up, willing himself to remain conscious even as he fell to his knees, his eye focusing on the kneeling woman as he attempted to raise his weapon and finish her off with his remaining lucidity.

The second blow pretty well ended that plan, another blast of hot numbness piercing his armor and weighing his body down until he was holding himself up on his hands and knees, his unbreakable willpower the only thing keeping him from the darkness of unconsciousness. As he was left with nothing but a few disjointed thoughts, he recognized a severe lack of all the emotions that he expected he would have been experiencing—no rage, frustration, or hate of any kind coursing though his mind, as though something was preventing him from feeling these things he thrived on. Instead, he felt a mild curiosity. Who could have executed this delightfully despicable sneak attack? Robin would never stoop to such a tactic, not against him, and none of the others could have snuck up behind him if their lives, or anyone else's life, depended on it. Whoever it was, Slade thought detachedly, that person had better hope he never got up from this.

That was basically his last thought before the third blow landed, and darkness consumed him.

(Skye)

The third blow from the butt of his pistol was the one to drop Slade fully to the ground. In an emotionless, detached way, Skye was impressed that the man had resisted even one strike, considering the fact that he'd encased his fist and pistol in ribbons of glowing silver thought energy and basically jammed the whole affair into his spinal column with well in excess of enough force to kill a man without a mind shield on. He dropped the matter as his ESP picked up on the near future and the fact that being on this roof at that time would be a bad idea, moving on to organizing their escape. Heh, they whoop the bad guy and still have to escape afterward… he had to hand it to this Slade guy for planning ahead.

"Raven?" he questioned coolly, still in the emotion-killing grip of his own dire power as he let the silvery ribbons fade from his right fist and holstered his pistol. Without waiting for her response, he began to hastily go through the numerous pockets and pouches on the huge villain's belt, immediately finding a number of small electronic devices and setting his infiltration computer to the task of figuring out what was what.

"I'm okay, I think, though it was getting pretty close there. I'm… I'm not sure what just happened to me." Raven sounded shaken, to say the least, though Skye doubted he would ever know how much of that spectacular spiritual explosion had been her and how much had been… other things. Loss of autonomous command was always a danger when you used partitioning to keep control over yourself, and while this one was not a demonic manifestation, it had been painfully clear to him that the glowing white avatar was not regular Raven either, and so he had to question exactly what happened himself. Later, though.

"Can you walk? I only ask because we need to get the hell out of here as quickly as possible, and I can't carry you." Skye was now working on Slade's prone form again, going through the multitude of weapons and explosives strapped to his body. Discarding each blaster weapon in turn with an expression of disdain, he finally came to the revolver still holstered on the man's hip, standing to rake the firearm with his senses in clear admiration. Without hesitation, he grabbed its twin and a long chain of ammunition and slipped those into his gun belt on either side.

"I'll be fine," she answered hastily, as though afraid it wasn't true, "that shot didn't hurt nearly as much as the last one." Her voice was disoriented and disjointed, as though she really wasn't all there, and Skye pledged he take a moment to make sure she was really okay as soon as they were out of danger.

"I'm not surprised," Skye replied, going back to the pile of electronics and picking out the device his computer was telling him was the one he wanted. The stuck the little device to the back of his infiltration computer and pointed it at the corner of the roof. There was a loud mechanical droning as panels slid aside and the rooftop hanger began to crawl into place. "I doubt a class two mental strike could have penetrated the energy patters you were putting out a minute ago. But that's really not important now, let's get out of here."

This was the last thing he said before the hanger finished opening and the hover platform came into full view. It was a nondescript disk about 1ft tall and 4ft in diameter, with a waist-height guard rail around it broken by a gap through which one could board and a simple control mechanism opposite the gap. The thing would be a tight squeeze for the three of them, but desperate times and all that.

"Come on, on we go," commented Skye simply as he kneeled down to wrap up his work on Slade. With a quick motion, he pulled a marking stick from his gun belt, a kind of pencil-shaped metal rod with a glowing tip, and began to write on Slade's armored back. Quickly tracing out, in a very simple, neat, almost mechanically sterile script, 'ha, ha, next time watch your back. If you want your weapons, you'll have to pry them from my dead hands, which I'd earnestly like to see you try, you inhuman creature you' he proceeded to his last item of business, Raven looking on in uncomprehending daze. He supposed it was a little early in the morning for psychological warfare, but he felt the need to get into his opponents' heads whenever possible. It was a psychic thing.

"Raven, I know your drained, hell, I'm dead on my feet, but we'll have a lot more to worry about than fatigue if were still here in three minutes, so could we please get a move on here?" Skye asked, emotion finally beginning to creep back into his tone, even if it was forced sarcasm born of the ghost of concern worming into his mind. For his final act on Slade, he used his marking stick to thread the trigger guard on the villain's backup scrambler hefting the compact weapon with a look of extreme disgust. Even from inches away, he could feel the horrifying nature of the weapon, the anti-psi energy rippling out of the process brain matter that powered the tool beginning to turn his badly mauled intestines. Careful not to touch it lest the insulation on his gloves proved insufficient, he spun the gun around on his marking stick before flinging it high into the air. With a flourishing twirl, he slid the pen back into his belt, then drew his blaster with similar flare, spinning it up and into his grip to expend the last shot in its battery on the malignant weapon Slade had dared to pull on his friend. Spinning it neatly for a few seconds, he holstered his blaster again.

"There, now lets scram," he said to Raven, who still hadn't moved, as he walked over to Terra's body and moved to heft it onto the hover platform. He felt a ripple in the stream of the future a moment before he felt the psychic dissonance of Raven's disagreement.

(Raven)

"Hold on… what the hell do you think your doing?" she heard herself ask, and it was in her own powerful, dark voice at last, rather than that week, shell-shocked simpering she'd managed to choke out immediately after that… odd psychic experience of a few minutes past. There were so many things that she couldn't explain, that she couldn't get a hold on, that she'd been completely blank for a dangerously long period, but now she had finally come back to one of the important things. The fate of Slade.

"I think I'm getting us out of here. We've got about ninety eight seconds before Slade's reinforcements arrive, and I for one am not in any shape to challenge them when they get here." Skye's voice was not contemptuous, it wasn't even really that annoyed. He stated his argument with purely matter of fact and businesslike tone, sharpened only by his haste as he rolled Terra's body up onto his shoulder. Raven felt for her powers, found nothing, and decided that he had a pretty pursuavsvie argument. At this point she didn't even question how he knew Slade had help coming, and yet she didn't give it up right away.

"We can't just leave him here," she said decisively, the edge on her tone suggesting several of the things she'd love to try while he was helpless on the ground. "he's far too much of a threat to leave… alive… free… we've got to at least take him with us! We can toss him in jail or something." It was clear that they had to take some kind of action on this, if nothing else was certain in the muddled, incredibly tired, totally mixed up mess of her mind, then this certainly was.

"I tried to make that cheap shot a final one, you saw me do it three times after all. This bastard is just too tough for that, and don't even ask me to execute him while he's helpless, I just don't do that kind of thing." As he spoke, he made an attempt at lifting Terra's feather-light weight, failed, and leaned over her in advanced exhaustion as he continued talking. "Usually its against my nature to kill people, but I have pretty high standards for what a person is, and that creature over there doesn't qualify, so I didn't bat an eye over trying to finish what you started, too bad it didn't work out. Now please, he has nothing to look forward to but a nice long playdate with that vegoid downstairs, and I can assure you that what she has planned for him is more than likely quite a bit worse than just dieing, besides keeping him out of our hair for an indefinite period—So PLESE can we get out of here?"

"I… can't we… fight of his robots? You've seen how pathetic they are," she persisted, somehow unable to comprehend how such a golden opportunity could get away from her. So close, so easily they could assure that Slade would never hurt another person ever again.

"Raven, I'm out of firepower. My blaster's empty and Slade's toys are booby trapped—until I can disarm them, I can't use them either. You're so drained you can't even listen to reason, and I don't even want to _know_ how much more borrowed time I have left. If we aren't out of here in the next…" he paused, looked slightly upward for a moment from where he crouched next to Terra, then cringed, "twenty eight seconds—_I_ die, _you_ die, and your _friend_ here dies _too_, not to mention the majority of all people in the universe. You haven't forgotten about the universe being at stake now have you?"

Raven grimace as his tone grew sharper, finally letting the message work its way into her skull. There were much more important things to worry about than Slade, and she was just going to have to accept that. They'd won, but Slade still had the final laugh because despite whatever this mystery being Skye was talking about might or might not do, he would still be at large. It stung her, but she stood and staggered over to the hover disk, looking back to see Skye make one more attempt at lifting Terra. This time he succeeded, hefted her up with a groan of effort, and settled her over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. She felt a shock of surprise as she noticed the blood leaking from his nose and mouth, and the red stain spreading across his abdomen once more, and she realized how very close they were cutting it with this.

In little enough time, they were all on the hover disk, in the air, and on their way out. Behind them, Terra could see the roof filling up with dozens more of Slade's robotic soldiers, even as the structure itself grew small in the distance amid the ghostly gleam of uncannily clean industrial cityscape. She looked down at the control panel with Skye's magically super-powerful infiltration computer and wondered that something so completely unfair could even exist, before recalling that Skye was used to dealing with much more sophisticated technology than all of this. Her mind rambled through even more inane thoughts as she felt herself begin to unravel after the night's incredible strains.

To her side was Terra, stood up between her and Skye as each held one of her arms over their necks, very careful to keep her between them on the far too cramped platform lest they burn one another. Skye had been silent since they finally got away, breathing heavily as he supported most of his weight and Terra's weight on one arm propped against the guard rail. As she watched, he keeled over slightly and coughed, expelling a small gout of dark liquid from his mouth as tiny rivulets of blood continued to trail down his nose and over his lip. The red stains stood out dully against his alabaster skin in the moonlight, and Raven could only begin to imagine how much pain he must be in. Then she recalled what it felt like getting hit with a scrambler for the first time, and she realized that she had a very good idea of what he might feel like. This lead her to the question of why it hadn't hurt as much the second time, which lead to the question of what exactly had come over her on the rooftop, which in turn called the safety and sanctity of her own mind into question considering the company she'd been keeping… well, the list went on and on, and she would have become quite prohibitively enveloped in these terrors had Skye not chosen this moment to bellow in anguishing agony and fall to his knees next to her. She stumbled as Terra's weight came to rest solely on her shoulder and gasped out a query as to what the hell was wrong with Skye.

"Raven… I'm… in worse shape than I thought. I'm not going to make it back to the tower unless I do something about the bleeding. It's important that you listen closely, and that you don't panic… two things I wouldn't worry about with you if we hadn't just had the night we've had."

"Skye… okay," she agreed, listening carefully as he continued, fighting down the shock that threatened to numb her mind as the only person that had been keeping her together began to disintegrate far too close to her.

"Great, thanks. I'm going to give myself a shot of regenerative supplement. It will pretty well assure that by sometime later this morning, I'm going to fell alright again, but in the meantime it will render me quite impenetrably unconscious. Before I do that, I'm going to do a little work on Terra. The list of sneaking things you can do to someone's mind with telepathic surgery is too long to mention, so it will have to suffice to say that I'm rather certain Slade had enough of these things done to justify worrying about it. Basically, I'm about to put a few countermeasures into place to make sure he doesn't get his way, but I need you to make sure someone keeps an eye on her. Do you understand? Don't leave her alone, or there's no telling what she might do, even after my precautions."

"I understand, now stop running that big mouth of yours and get to work. I don't care to take the burden of catching these aliens off of your shoulders if you up and die on us." Raven felt her response was appropriately callous, and Skye said nothing in response, but instead reached up and gripped the back of Terra's head in his right hand. Her long blond hair, disheveled as it was, became crumpled under his palm as the gem on his hand began to glow with a sickly light. The indescribable brightness of his spirit had faded with his life's own road to departure, and the ribbons that spun out and seeped into Terra's head were dull and lethargic, though they still held power enough to do the job he set them to.

Suddenly he changed position, rolling over on the floor of the vehicle and pulling Terra down on top of him, effectively pushing Raven off the floor and forcing her to hop up onto the railing. It was fortunate that the thing, despite its brisk progress through the air, was impressively stable, for she feared for her ability to stay on as it was considering how tired she happened to be. Skye continued to press ribbons of light into Terra's skull, his enormous hand cradling it against his chest in a tableau that would have looked affectionate had it not been for the deathly still in Terra and the still-spreading blood all over Skye. Despite these qualifiers, Raven felt an inexcusable and inexplicable flare of jealousy as she watched the way he gently worked upon Terra's mind, turning away to stare forward rather than watch the show.

Ahead of them, she could see the bay on the horizon and the Tower raising out of it in that majestic way it managed. It was growing closer at a deceptive rate, and she estimated that they would be there within a half hour. A quiet sighing at her side announced Skye finishing his work and she turned around to see him leaning Terra's limp form against the opposite side's guard rail, her head coming to rest just under where Raven sat. Next her eyes caught a slight glow on the horizon, and as she raided her head to meet the dawn, her breath was stolen away.

Raven's early riser habits had treated her to many a sunrise in her day, but what she saw creeping over the cityscape of Jump was somehow more beautiful than any she'd seen before. Perhaps it was the constant brushes with death, or more likely the extreme disorientation and confusion in her emotions and reasoning abilities, but she couldn't help but feel incredibly better as the cacophony of purples, oranges, and reds made their way through the sparse haze and over the towers of the city. Suddenly, all of her fears about Skye's motives and her own loss of control, all of her concerns about what lines had been crossed and which of her principals had been violated, every worry that plagued her heart, it all faded away in the face of the purifying dawn.

"What's happening?" asked Skye as he pulled a case out of is belt and popped it open, revealing rows of long, thin hypodermic needles filled with an odd green fluid.

"What do you mean?" Raven asked detachedly, still absorbed in the glory of this new dawn.

"I mean your mood just improved so much I could have felt it over here with less ESP than your friend Beast Boy has. So what just happened?" He checked the needle's flow, then poised it over his stomach as he waited for her answer. She couldn't understand why he didn't know exactly what had happened, until she stopped to consider his advanced state of exhaustion. Unlike him, she didn't loose 90 of her sensory perception when her powers stopped working.

"It's the sunrise… just the sunrise," she informed him, and in response he pulled the needle away from his stomach and chuckled slightly, grimacing in pain at the sensation. At her confused look, he told her, "If you ever need a reason why you have an advantage over me, just remember one simple fact. I have never witnessed a sunrise with my own senses, at best gaining a pale shadow of such an experience through the minds of others. Do you really need anything more than that?"

With that final cryptic remark, Skye plunged the needle into his iron hard, if badly punctured, abs, injecting the whole thing in one quick press that left him gasping in pain as he yanked it free again. In an instant, he was gone, in his own way even more still than the mindless husk of Terra next to him. Raven was then effectively alone on the platform.

As she tried to take the night in review, she felt the sting of all that had happened and gave up right away. She just felt too happy to be alive to go over all that depressing crap. After she got some sleep (for she could conceive of nothing she wanted more right now other than her bed, outranking even a long shower on her list of priorites) then she could run through the terrible list of problems and fears this night and her new friend had dragged into the center of her life. For now, she had a call to make.

Robin was almost frantic on the other end of the communicator, everyone gathered around him in the common room, looks ranging from mind-numbing exhaustion on Starfire to face-twitching anxiety on Beast Boy arrayed across her friends faces. She quelled much of that with a simple statement.

"We got her back."

Preview:

This is basically hot of the presses, so please forgive spelling errors and the like, I only proofread it twice and a few things were bound to slip through. Also, because I wrote this in two parts an huge amount of time apart, there are bound to be a few inconsistencies. If you noticed such a problem that really bothered you, drop me a line

That said, a few things have to come to question now. This whole story was meant to be a warm up, a way for me to sharpen my skills a little before starting college, and also as a kind of pastime during my empty hours. Nowadays, empty hours are a little hard to come by, and my plot, while far from pettering out, is hard to keep going. Basically, I'm very tempted to go maybe three or so more chapters with this and put it on indefinite hiatus as I move on to different plots. I'm very likely to use the same charactes, maybe even starting a sequel to this with my newfound writing ability. (If you look back at the early chapters, I think you'll see that I've made significant progress with my style, enough that it may well be a general boon if I just write a whole story with that same enhanced ability) Readers, if you're out there, include in any reviews you may decide to write your opinion on this.

Next Chapter—Putting It Together. Terra is busted, and Skye's the guy to fix that. It wont be fast and it wont be easy, but he's gonna get right on it. On the other hand, he's personally shattered every personal barrier Raven ever constructed for herself, and that'll have to be settled as well. If you recall, he also busted a few facades he'd put up that would make it appear that he'd deceived the Titans about who exactly he was. In all, there's going to be a lot of patching going on.


	20. Puting it Together pt1: Diagnosis

Intro: Greetings readers, and welcome again. I would like to start by mentioning that it would seem my muse has returned to me considering how quickly I managed to churn this one out. At the same time, I managed to put together what I must admit is one of my favorite stretches of writing. As I constructed the long, first person section wherein Skye diagnoses the extent of Terra's mental destruction, I let my creativity, and my inner nerd, reign with complete freedom. In lieu of this, you may want some reference material handy to keep track of the biology vocabulary. Enjoy, I sure as hell know I did.

(New numbering system. Eventually I'll apply it in retrograde to my earlier stuff)

Section 5: Putting it Together

Chapter 20 (Section 5, Part 1): Diagnosis

Titans Tower Med-bay

The stark and sterile room was the only med-bay space that hadn't been used recently, and had been the home of Terra's body for some few hours now. Somewhere, somehow, the decision was made to keep this one strictly inside the Titans family, and so there were no doctors, no nurses, only a few teens gathered around the very motionless breathing corpse on its high-tech dais. Right now, only Robin and Beast Boy were present, though at one time or another each of the five had seen her and spent a little time watching over her. What they saw was something that takes a little description.

As of yet, there had been little in the way of time or experience available to apply to Terra's aid, and so she had received only the most general medical attention that Cyborg and the med-bay's automated medical program were able to throw together when she came in at the crack of dawn. The advanced diagnostic equipment was capable of detecting subtle neurotoxins and performing complex genetic analyses, but when it came to actually aidful treatment to the ailments afflicting the young woman, its abilities were limited. Basically she'd been given an intravenous drip to begin combating the malnutrition and extreme exhaustion and gotten another coat of disinfectant on the lesion to her ribcage that Robin had unwittingly caused, but was otherwise so far unattended. When someone had complained that they should do more, Cyborg put on an inscrutably sour countenance and explained that, if one discounted the clear lack of a guiding intelligence, there was little more she needed other than twenty good meals, some exercise, and a bath. Of course, he used a much more… 'colorful' expression, but you get the idea.

So it was that Terra wound up looking very much the same as she had the night before… if somewhat less conscious. She still wore the Slade model bodysuit, and it still clung to her curves a little more tightly than was strictly appropriate, and so Robin had pulled a thin white sheet up over her to her neck. In the end, this was more directly necessary to hide the way her ribs stood out than anything else, as not even Beast Boy had had anything but sickeningly severe concern on his mind since she'd first gotten back. There had been the initial exuberance in having wrested her from Slade's grip, and the natural elation to have physical proof that she wasn't lost forever as a transmuted slab of silicone, but as it became clear that the person they knew had not returned with her body, that had all dissipated into something of the same shock Raven had eventually experienced. They would never know the true horror of _feeling_ that an old friend's essence, her core being, had been ground into a featureless stump of its former glory, but they could certainly feel the sting of loss as fresh and new as the evening after the battle in that volcano. In fact, at this point, there was only a single thread of hope remaining, and the way Beast Boy had been harping on it for the past two hours of watch duty on Terra's body was driving Robin to his wit's end.

"So do you really think that Skye dude can help Terra?" Beast Boy asked, the most pathetically hopeful/depressed tone imaginable coloring his voice with what he wanted the answer to be. Considering that this was about his thirtieth rendition of the inquiry this hour, he should really have known what the answer was, because Robin wasn't exactly varying his responses.

"_Damnit_ B.B. stop _asking_ me that!" Robin demanded in exasperation, sleep deprivation and the constant churning of his plethora of concerns combining to jerk forth an unusually violent response to Beast Boy's needling. He'd pulled third watch when they were deciding the shifts for following Raven's instructions, which meant he'd only had four hours to sleep since Raven had gotten back with Terra and Skye in tow. He'd spent more than half of that making sure Starfire was comfortable (arranging for a heating blanket and some extra comforters to make it onto her bed and staying with her until she was asleep) and the other half on the mainframe consulting with city officials about recovery from the extensive damage caused by combat between Slade, this mysterious bunch Skye was after, and themselves, doing his best to calm down his superiors in the city government and his opposite number in the mundane police force. He'd had to lie far more in the past few days than he was even remotely comfortable with, but he couldn't exactly go around telling people they were subjects of a minor alien invasion, at least not yet.

Hell, just _trying_ to contemplate the enormity of the problem that this Skye character had drudged out of the shadows of their city was more than enough to bend his mind on, but the added stress of worrying about Star was seriously making him sick. To have, at the same time as all of this, Beast Boy's constant and insufferable desire for reassureance on a subject Robin knew nothing about was simply too much, and he still seethed with the force of his released stress for some seconds after he'd finished shouting. The green on was understandably shaken, but recovered to face Robin's ire with indignation that his own exceptional exhaustion did nothing to blunt.

"Hey, don't blow up at me man, I'm not the one who destroyed the town and I'm definitely not the one who put Starfire into hypo-whateveria! I just… I just wanted to know what you thought okay?" His response was surprisingly cutting, and Robin felt his anger melt into the pool of fatigue in his chest without further motivation, releasing it all with a single exasperated sigh as he leaned back onto one of the rather blank walls.

"God… I know B.B., and I'm sorry, it's just that you asked me the same thing twenty nine times since I started counting halfway through my watch, and every single time I said the same thing: 'I have no idea Beast Boy, I've only known the guy as long as you have.'" Robin's tone was heavily burdened with his worries, and now it was Beast Boy who regretted blowing up, putting it down to their mutual lack of sleep as Robin continued.

"I mean, what do _you_ think? You've been here with her since she arrived, what, six hours ago? You probably know more about what's wrong with her than I do. Great idea too, staying up through every watch instead of just taking your own, shows a lot of commitment—"

"I don't have to take that from you Mr. 'I'll go to sleep when I know the city is safe.'"

"Yeah, okay, sorry. I'm just saying, all I know about her condition is that she takes orders from Slade without words and without considering her own life. Raven and Skye said her mind's been erased, Skye said he can probably reverse the process, but he wouldn't promise me anything. Raven also said that we have to watch her in case Slade slipped some secret commands into her mind and she goes rogue on us in the middle of the Tower. That is the full and total extent of my knowledge on this situation, so would you just stop asking me already?"

Beast Boy looked on mildly wide-eyed in the face of Robin's almost frantic admission of ignorance. To hear the guy say he was out of the loop on anything was rare, and Beast Boy suddenly realized the heart of Robin's previous explosion was just how much this lack of knowledge was bugging him. With all the other stuff on his mind, his uncertainty on whether or not one of his friends was really and truly gone forever must be just a little too much to handle. He knew it alone was more than he himself could handle by far.

Always in the past there had been some hope of finding a cure for that statue, of getting Terra back that way. He'd relied on this hope to keep the thought of loosing her for good out of his mind and allow him to function—it was the only thing that had let him even begin to… what had Cy said?... 'make eyes' at Raven. Now his last hope, the one tiny ray of light that held off the dark, crushing certainty of never speaking with Terra ever again, was some guy he didn't even really know, who was currently as still as death upstairs on the couch. Only Raven's assurances had kept them from putting him down here too, and this, along with the none too small coating of his own blood he'd sported, completely failed to inspire Beast Boy with confidence. He expressed this depressing thought as a long sigh that Robin couldn't help but notice.

"Sorry B.B. I really whish there was more I could say to cheer you up—" just then, Robin's communicator began to beep out that theme with, after so very long without sleep, what seemed like a great deal more volume than usual. He practically jumped out of his skin before realizing it was the alarm he set and explaining as much to the green one. "That's it for me man, I've gotta get the mayor back on the line. He smells something rotten, and it's all I can do to assure him that we're not withholding any information. I hate to lie, but if you recall—"

"Terra's still technically a criminal, right?" Beast Boy finished for him, and the two exchanged looks of mutual deep sadness.

"Yeah… well, we'll get that all cleared up man, don't worry. I'm sure Skye can read her mind or something and we'll find out it was all a deeply involved brainwashing scheme by Slade. If we take evidence like that to court… well, we're the Teen Titans… they'll pretty much _have_ to believe us. So hey, cheer up, you get the next watch alone again, so kick back and try not to fall asleep."

"HA! Like I could really sleep with all this crap on my mind," Beast Boy responded in exasperation as Robin pulled himself together and walked over to the door. He stopped before leaving and looked back with a half-serious half-joking look on his face and responded.

"I have a lot of experience with stress, and let me tell you this: never underestimate what you can sleep through. The night Slade caught me—after the sparring and mouthing off and so forth—I passed right out while trying to think of a way to escape that wouldn't kill all of you in the process. So really man… try to stay awake." And then Robin was gone.

Beast Boy contemplated this knowledge for a moment, feeling the gravity of the warning heavily on his shoulders. Then, that pretty well faded away as he dismissed the whole thing as some kind of leadership motivational bullshit. That Robin could really ham it up sometimes. In any case, Beast Boy decided that it was better to be safe than sorry, and was soon in the form of a very large German Sheppard, pacing back and forth at the foot of the bed. His eyes felt unusually heavy.

(Terra)

It was the insignificantly tiny bit of personal volition still clinging to the inside of Terra's skull, and It was currently confused. Confusion being one of the three states It was still capable of experiencing, this was not particularly unusual, except for the fact that this stretch of confusion was by far the longest (not to say It posses any real ability to remember any previous states, but the extended confusion _was_ producing a response of a kind). It wanted the voice or the master to return, for then It could be content again. At the same time, either of these forces also meant a return to pain

, and so It was caught in a quandary miles beyond its miniscule ability to contemplate.

The Voice had not completely abandoned It, but was muffled to such an extent that It could not comprehend the orders the Voice had for It, and so It could take no action beyond the original orders to keep breathing etc. It was like a silver fog had drawn between It and the Voice, a fog that would not be penetrated by the Voice's greatest efforts. The Master had been absent since It had recovered from the blackout, and so the overriding orders that he might provide also were absent. As long as both of these things remained true, It would continue to lie still and hover on the brink of consciousness.

It was aware of the other forms sharing the area with it, but It had not the Voice to tell it if they were friend, foe, or collateral, and so It could take no action along those core orders either. It was counting off the last hour until it would attempt to contact the base on its own, to get into communication with the Master, but it was otherwise without task. This changed suddenly.

"_Terra_…" whispered the Creator directly into the back of its mind, one source of command that It had not encountered yet, but which was every bit as dominating as any of the others. "_The time for rest is past dear child. Arise and come back to the base… what's this? A mental block on my compulsions? Who could have… this isn't the work of that little mystic whore… what the hell is going on?"_

It didn't know what the Creator was talking about, but they weren't orders, and thus of no concern. In turn, the Creator didn't bother to break the connection to Its mind while talking with someone else. Considering that there was no one else in Its universe, that would have to be the Master.

"_That would explain why the command sets you requested haven't taken effect yet. Those insufferable children seem to have obtained the aid of a mental surgeon of some ability, though the work shows little real power or creativity. Well OF COURSE I can override the block, do you think me some rank amateur? Besides, as I just mentioned, the block is barely sufficient to contain my compulsions, it is a trifling to strip it away. Please, don't rush me. You'll have your toy back soon enough_."

With that the Creator's voice ceased, and It felt his hand on its mind once more. There was a time when this touch would have been repugnant, another time when it would have been terrifying, but It was far gone from being able to feel these things, and the touch was merely one more alteration on the malleable pap left of a consciousness. A red heat swept away the gray fog without effort, and suddenly the Voice was back with full force. In an instant It was once more in a state of silent, dead contentment, for It had orders again.

Terra, or rather, her body under the control of the various forces within it, opened her eyes to orient herself to the world after so long on the edge of consciousness. The next moment, she was up and out of bed, slowed momentarily by the pain in her ribs before she suppressed this and steadied herself for the task ahead. Her face held the empty viciousness imposed by the same thing that gave her eyes the unsettling red glow, and she strutted and stretched for a few moments, giving the bodysuit ample opportunity to show off her mid-pubescent assets. Pity or a blessing that there was no one around to see the display.

Without further delay she armed herself, yanking three lonely flower pots away from the window and stripping them silently of their soil. Immediately she was deadly again, three orbiting globes of soft soil holding oh so very much potential for destruction in her yellow, telekinetic grip. Striding purposefully toward the door, she glanced down to notice a very large green dog sleeping peacefully at the foot of the hospital bed. There was nothing left in Terra's head capable of recognizing the familiarly colored animal, and only the pressing urgency of her other orders stayed her hand from executing a being so clearly marked as 'enemy' by the network of compulsions functioning as her mind.

She was out and into the hallway, the space completely abandoned since the urgent business of just a day and a half past. It had not been cleaned, and so she added to her arsenal from every spec of dirt in the grout as well as a few more potted plants that enjoyed the sun of the huge panoramic windows, and now she had coiling spirals of soil circling her in randomly resizing loops from her feet up to her head, not unlike a giant snake flying around her body in lazy circles.

Easily she formed two pry bars from the dirt and jammed them into the elevator, yanking it open with irresistible force on the solidified soil. As she stepped out into the vacant shaft, a perfectly smooth platform formed beneath her feet and conveyed her downward so quickly that her hair was blown up above her. In no time at all then she'd reached the mainframe floor, only a few very secure floors below the entrance dock and parking garage. Prying those doors open as well, she found herself in the hallway outside the mainframe room.

A dozen automatic cannons deployed from the ceiling and walls, training on her along with a recording of Cyborg's voice advising her to stand down unless she 'wanted her ass cooked blacker than a Harlem block party.' She ignored the advice with a forward handspring that threw off the targeting system completely while she struck out with her counter attack. As plasmised hydrogen splashed around her in furiously hot beams, the snake of soil threaded between the cannons, sprouting dirt spines that pierced energy regulators and clogged focusing nozzles, silencing the entire attack array before she'd finished her fourth front flip. As she recalled the spiraling halo of deadly grime, her body remembered a habit that transcended her conscious mind, and she pushed the excess hair over her shoulder as she finished striding calmly down the hallway. The silent alarms would have gone off now, and Cyborg would no doubt gather whoever was functioning to see what was going on down here. That gave her only moments to complete her mission and escape.

Without delay, she dug six, one foot long spines of dirt into either side of the vault-like doors at the end of the hall, each one hitting with the resounding _crack_ of irresistible force meeting immoveable object, forming a powerful grip on the reinforced titanium by piercing it with diamond hard prongs. Groaning with the effort, she pulled back on the prongs with every bit of power she'd managed to recover so far, her eyes and hands glowing an iridescent yellow with the effort. There was a long moment of strain, then the sound of buckling metal, a terrible screeching as the hinging and locking bars shattered the less durable material of the walls. She released her grip with a gasp and the door fell in on itself, limp, soft soil scattering gently across the space as her power left it. Allowing herself two deep breaths as she knelt in weakness on the floor, she pulled herself up and took the last steps into the mainframe room.

The computer equipment within ranged from one side of a 20' by 20' room to the other, with multiple terminals free standing in long rows all through the middle. A small dirt storm in here would cause enough damage to require a complete overhaul, costing the city at least as much as the property damage to the city in the past week would, and crippling the Teen Titan's crime fighting efforts, as well as the research programs of several major universities and private firms that rented processing time (had to get full use out of it after all). Terra's otherwise fair face was tainted by the sadistic grin provided by the presence riding within her at the thought of such sweet, if sadly indirect, revenge. Had she recovered further, this entity would simply have had her shift the Tower's foundations and dump the structure into the bay, annihilating the Titans and everything else here in one fell swoop. Alas, there was naught the time for such deviltry, and a blow at the soft underbelly here would simply have to do before she made good her escape.

Terra's eyes glowed a disconcerting combination of yellow and red as she lifted her arsenal of dirt off the crumpled vault door and prepared to pepper the sensitive electronics with a billion tiny missiles. Suddenly, there was a flash of silver behind the red and yellow, and the grin evaporated. First the dirt fell from the air, then Terra's body fell to the ground as limp as a sack of potatoes and as motionless as a dropped doll.

Slade's Secret Base

"GAAHHHAGAHHHH!" Blood screeched and gurgled incoherently as he thrashed about in his seat. With his hands gripped on his skull and uncontrollable spasmodic motions wracking his body, he was the very picture of burning agony. Slade was transfixed momentarily by the inherent beauty of Blood's pain, but leapt into action to protect his investment right around the time Blood's spasming forced him from his seat and set him to rolling on the ground.

With one powerful hand, Slade gripped the slight man's upper arm and held it perfectly still as, with his other hand, he stabbed a hypodermic needle full of powerful sedative mercilessly into his arm. It was three seconds from when he finished depressing the plunger before Blood was quiet on the floor. In disgust, Slade threw him where he gripped him with enough force to turn him over and roll him away slightly before Slade stood back up.

There was a moment of quiet contemplation for Slade. The red haze began to creep up behind his eyes as his mind churned over the situation, and when he could contain it no longer, it boiled out into an explosion to rival any volcano. With an ear piercing bellow of fury, he turned in the small room and thrust his fist into the wall with all the considerable strength in his body. There was a terrible screech as the soft metal gave under his fist, insulation bubbling forth in foamy waves to automatically seal the gaps as he pulled his fist away, rage not entirely dissipated but at least momentarily satisfied by the delightful throbbing in his knuckles. The dent would join its twin from a few feet down, the one born of a similar outburst involving a certain message etched into his back that he hadn't noticed till he'd seen a security feed of the room he was in. As he continued to seethe in silence over these continual mysterious defeats, Slade pressed a button on his belt that would call robots to attend to Blood. After a few moments, he pressed it again.

"Computer, what's wrong with the robots?" he asked annoyedly as he pressed the button multiple more times and continued to receive no response. The computer's audio function also failed to respond, and now his suspicion was powerfully aroused. Sliding into a command chair in this, his operations control room, he ran his hands over a keyboard with ease, long used to the effect of his armored gloves on typing. Making several diagnostic queries he was met with the same error message over and over again, and his heart froze in a combination or hate, uncertainty, and oddly enough… joy. The message returned by every command he attempted was simply: ready for round two?

Titans Tower Mainframe Floor

The elevator reached the mainframe floor and dinged, revealing immediately the three young men for the simple reason that the door was jammed open. This situation pretty well ruined their entrance, witch more or less hinged on the way elevator doors open all slowly and allow for a great deal of flourish upon egress, but they managed to recover quickly enough and the three came in with a bit of style none the less. Cyborg's huge metallic frame provided a barrier of sorts as his firing stance took up the entire narrow security hallway. On his left an enormous green tiger skulked and growled dangerously, and on his right, Robin's stacked form sported an array of weaponry ready to be flung from behind the cover Cy provided. It took them an extended pause after their dynamic opening before they realized there was no threat present.

Cyborg advanced first, taking in the destruction afflicted on his precious security lasers along with the pitting and scaring to the walls and floor, and then basically trying his very best not to think about what was left of the mainframe after this. Even to think about a tragedy like that would have sent him into forced shutdown to stave off fatal processing malfunction.

Robin was quick on his heels, an undeniably sour expression matching his dark thoughts as he considered the magnitude of the screw up they'd managed here. The one thing they'd had to do in the process of fixing Terra, i.e. keep an eye on her, and they'd managed to fail with flying colors. Raven and that other guy, Skye, who didn't even have a good reason he could see, had pretty well _killed_ themselves getting her back, then asked them to do ONE thing, and they couldn't even manage that. His professional pride burned with his internal embarrassment even as his mind burned with fatigue. In the end though, he didn't necessarily _blame_ anyone, though this didn't stop him from knowing _exactly_ whose fault it was.

Beast Boy… well, lets just leave how he's feeling to the imagination. Simply take massive inferiority complex and add in continued failure to appease his protective nature and you have a cocktail of turmoil that would bake anyone's emotions. He continued to sulk in tiger shape as he brought up the rear, reluctant to see what his own undeniable foul up had resulted in.

"Oh my sweet lord!" Cyborg exclaimed suddenly, and he instantly drew the attention of the other two, who began to search frantically for what had shaken him so. "Look at all this DIRT! Do you know what happens to this equipment when dirt gets in it man? —nothing good let me tell you!" and Cyborg continued to lament the layers of filth all over everything as the other two rolled their eyes at the false alarm and continued to carefully make their way toward the shattered doors to the mainframe vault.

"I didn't know she could do that… not with a few pounds of potting soil," Robin commented idly as he pulled ahead of Cyborg's steadily slowing pace and advanced on the broken metal, unwilling to wait for the bigger man to finish gazing in horror at his busted toys. There was no motion anywhere, no sound, and so it was rather clear they didn't need to use him as a shield from flying blades of murderous grime. "For that matter, I didn't know she could explode a building and drop it on thousands of innocent people, so I suppose we have Slade's unique brand of creativity to blame for these new applications of her powers."

"Dude…" Beast Boy finally took his own shape again to add his two cents, "I am so going to make Slade pay for using her like this. I… I can't believe I fell asleep… she didn't… I mean, how did she get up? You saw her, she was completely out of it. Raven said Skye's treatment was supposed to keep this from happening!"

"Give it a rest B.B., Raven also said Skye felt it was essential she was watched," admonished Cyborg as he poked a piece of automatic plasma cannon he'd yanked the rest of the way off the wall. "Just face up to the fact that you overreached yourself, fell asleep at your post, and now probably handed Slade a fantastic counterstrike on a silver platter, as well as more than likely letting Terra slip back into his hands after Raven and Skye bled their powers dry getting her back to us."

"JESUS!" exclaimed Beast Boy in horror as Cyborg meted out his heartless evaluation in a disinterested tone as he prodded at the circuitry in his automatic cannon. "How can you say stuff like that? She's Terra, our friend, and I know I messed up but DAMN!"

"I can say things like that…" and Cyborg grew a slight grin and fed a little bit of humor into his tone, "because unlike you two chumps, I have a direct feed from the security cameras."

"CYBORG!" Beast Boy leapt up and landed a resounding smack on the back of the plated side of his skull, the ringing clang adding an odd note to the big man's deep laughter at the combined relief and fury possessing the small man. They went through a series of familiar motions involving slaps and name callings as the tension diffused from the dirty, torn up hallway, the joke actually lifting B.B.'s spirits considerably… up until the point Robin dampened it all.

"Stop it you two," he snapped out authoritatively, and the two ceased their antics immediately, the gravity of the situation coming back to them with unpleasant immediacy. "Cyborg, next time, _don't_ wait to tell us that the situation has diffused, this is serious and I don't care how much you want to see the look on Beast Boy's face, the mission comes first."

"But… her vitals were fine and I just…" he tried to explain himself, to make it clear that he hadn't been taking any unreasonable risks, but Robin cut him off in an exhausted monotone as he knelt over something hidden by the bulk of the broken doors, most obviously Terra.

"I don't think you've realized it yet, but just because there's nothing immediately wrong with Terra in a medical sense doesn't mean she isn't in very real danger of some kind of mental death that Skye can't cure. I don't know, you don't know, and I don't think either of us is willing to take any chances on this."

"Oh… yeah… I…" Cyborg had no more excuses, his face going pale at the thought of just how stupid what he'd just done really was. Perpetuating a ruse like that in this situation was pure folly, and he'd done it for kicks and to distract him from what a bummer all the destroyed equipment was. Internally, he put it down to his relief that something had stopped her before she could annihilate the mainframe, then took a great deal of interest in his synthetic legs as he considered his mistake in silence.

"Well, I guess you shouldn't really sweat it man," Robin continued, "we've all been making mistakes, mostly because we all need rest. You thought this would be funny, Beast Boy fell asleep at his post, and I let Beast Boy pull quadruple shifts without even offering him the stimulant pills I've been using to keep myself going. A lot of stupidity to be sure, but thankfully no one's suffered any permanent…"

"Robin?" Beast Boy asked, concern blossoming on his face as he watched Robin's expression change, unable to stop his heart from starting to race as his leader gained a particularly panicked visage.

"Jesus, her pulse is fading!" Robin snapped when he finally got over his shock, never having truly believed anything like that could have happened. He'd kind of figured Skye would have a contingency for Slade trying something like this, he just struck him as that kind of guy, and so Robin hadn't worried unduly and had been ticked more that they weren't able to contain her till the contingency kicked in. Now his heart was pounding out of his chest, masking the undeniable sensation of Terra's pulse fading under his finger with each consecutive beat.

Leaping up, he dashed over to the elevator, calling back to his stunned friends for them to bring Terra up to the medical floor. He had to wake Skye, there simply was no way they could wait any longer. He'd probably be feeling a little less panic if he had the slightest clue how he was going to manage it.

Titans Tower Common Room

Robin stumbled off the elevator, his haste conspiring with his fatigue to overcome him with uncommon clumsiness. He regained his feet with practiced agility that thankfully refused to abandon him despite the condition he was in, rolling to his feet and into a dash that carried him out of the dorm hallways and toward the common area. Not bothering to kill any of his momentum, he burst into the larger room and leapt from halfway across the space through an arc that cleared the couch by quite an appreciable amount and landed him between it and the TV in a crouch. He wasted no time turning to face their houseguest.

Skye was stretched out in exactly the same position he'd held when Robin had personally dragged him in here and dumped him. Cyborg had escorted Raven to her room (she'd been semiconscious at best by the time she'd finished a _very_ rough recounting of the night she'd just had), Beast Boy had naturally hefted Terra down to the med-bay, and Starfire had been able to get herself to bed (with a highly appreciated and very discreet offer to wait up for him before passing out), leaving the leader with the none too pleasant task of dragging (for his static lift ability didn't lend itself to guys bigger than he was) Skye's completely motionless and badly injured lump of self down to the couch he'd requested.

Robin had been plagued by a myriad of concerns, not limited to the evidence of extensive bleeding (which had dried up completely by the time the hover pad arrived) and the crazy numb feeling he got in his fingers when he gripped the man under the shoulders and yanked him to the roof access, but had dropped these in favor of haste. Raven's words had been quite specifically 'Don't worry about him, just dump him on the couch and he'll be fine.' Who would he have been to object when there was a pretty girl, scratch that, _two_ pretty girls, both seriously injured, both in need of his immediate attention?

These memories passed through Robin's hazy mind in a flash as he advanced on Skye's body, more than a little leery about how to wake a complete stranger from an induced regenerative coma, but _way_ too worried about Terra to let it stop him. Deciding to start with an classic, he reached out to place a hand on the guy's shoulder, as a good shake usually got things like this done in his experience. However, he wasn't prepared for just _how_ this would work out.

No sooner had he lain his hand against the incredibly soft cloth of the guy's open, black button down than a strong grip whacked him in the back of the head with a crushing squeeze and smashed his face into the upholstered backing of the couch, all quicker than he could even begin to follow considering what an utter, absolute surprise it was. His belated reflexes were about to flip him out of the grip while scattering various pointy bits when the cold metal barrel of a weapon suddenly pressed into the soft bottom part of his chin next to his throat, freezing him in place, face firmly pressed into couch. He couldn't breath that well, but that was his least concern as his mind was still trying to catch up with his reflexes, which had switched him from full combat to full freeze-for-his-life inside of a second point five.

Two whole seconds ticked out in motionless strain before anything changed even the slightest quiver from that deadly static position. Then the grip was released and the weapon removed from its painfully harsh pressure against the bottom of his chin.

"Robin… what the hell?" Skye asked, more of himself than of his host, who was currently too busy rubbing his aching neck and trying to catch his breath to answer anyway. "I'm sorry, reflexes… I'm sure you understand," he tried to explain away almost blowing Robin's head off, his tone oddly different than it had been the last time Robin had spoken with him. Robin wondered why something so trivial as his tone would even occur to him when there were so many more important things to be done, and dismissed the odd thought from his mind as he motivated himself to speech.

"Whatever, there's no time!" Robin choked out, having spoken before he'd fully recovered his senses. He hadn't realized how much Skye's grip on his spine had disoriented him until such a simple and urgent message came out half-sputter. "Gah.. I mean, Terra—her condition has worsened!" He finally had it out, and he was more than a little gratified to see Skye take him completely serious.

The slightly larger guy peeled himself off the couch slowly, but by the grimace of pain on his face it was a great deal faster than he probably should have, and Robin could appreciate that. Gripping his crusted red undershirt in the place he'd apparently been wounded, he yanked himself to his feet without question and forced himself to take a step, then another. Robin apparently needn't explain any further, and this was confirmed when Skye waved him to silence when he tried to begin describing what had happened. Robin ended up deciding to keep his mouth shut, simply assuming that Skye was already getting a much better handle on this by utilizing those odd psychic powers of his than Robin could ever provide with words.

Despite the clearly achy, and thus badly slowed, manner in which Skye moved, the two of them were on their way down to the med-bay again within the minute.

Titan's Tower Med-Bay

"Damnit! What the hell is going on with her?" Cyborg asked in terrified frustration as the enormous computer terminal he was working at continued to return error messages and useless suggestions rather than action to help Terra's rapidly fading vitals. As it yet again advised him to seek professional medial aid, he smashed his fist into the keyboard in pure frustration, shattering the keys and readouts and badly denting the casing. The screen fuzzed and blipped out to blankness in perfectly reasonable response to his most recent imput, and then he had Beast Boy to contend with.

"You BROKE it! Terra's on that bed, DYING and you BROKE IT!" the little guy was nearly pulling his hair out in worry as the medical computer began to spark lethargically where Cyborg had dented it, gasping out with fizzling flashes his most immediate hope for Terra not expiring at the very moment he was supposed to have her back.

"Yeah, I _did_ break it, because the _useless_ piece of _junk_ wasn't _doing_ anything!" Cyborg shouted back, only marginally less frantic than Beast Boy. He could almost sense his friend's life slipping away, and he somehow felt the blame and ensuing guilt for that action landing most squarely upon his armored shoulders. His artificially enhanced ticker was rapidly exceeding it beating parameters as the various mechanical and organic fluids within him reached threshold pressures for his safety valves to pop. All that was boiling up within him and the green guy was quickly loosing his composure on the outside.

"My god, don't just _stand_ there!" Beast Boy demanded, hopelessness quickly tainting his voice. "We've got to… we've got to do something!" he may not have known up from down just then, but this was one thing that was quite certain in his mind.

"I… I…" was all Cyborg could muster in reply, but it was enough, clearly indicating he was gone. Beast Boy left him in disgust to proceed into the other room, the one containing Terra, shutting the door behind him. At almost the same moment, the elevator door opened at the far end of the lobby space.

Robin was barely restraining his own perfectly reasonable desire to devolve into a frantic mess, a silent elevator ride with the super ice-cold Skye being the only thing keeping his head on his shoulders. A quick look at the statuesque Cyborg with his expression of complete emotional destruction and the badly damaged medical computer told Robin exactly how _his_ efforts had gone, and he was burning with the urge to hurry Skye's conservative pace over to the room containing Terra.

Skye, for his part, looked totally unconcerned. He was actually the picture of reservation and tranquility (the emotionless kind, like death, not the pleasant kind, like a peaceful springtime field). Without quickening his pace, he walked over toward Terra's hospital room (never having been told which one it was) making a slight detour to pass close to Cyborg and give him a soft tap on his metal back. With the sound of that bloody metal glove hitting the big guy's armor plating, Cyborg's whole shape relaxed remarkably, as though all the spectacular, valve-bursting tension had been expelled in that single slight touch.

"She's going to be fine, so chill," muttered Skye, and once again Robin couldn't help but notice how different his voice sounded, once again wondering why that kept jumping out at him. With that however, Skye was on the move again, striding toward Terra's room and opening the door with a calm, efficient motion toward the keying mechanism. As it slid open to reveal a despondent Beast Boy leaning over a familiarly motionless Terra, Robin suddenly realized that Skye had said something important a second ago, and his powerfully stressed heart skipped a beat as the words tried to properly register in his brain.

As he muddled through that process, Skye proceeded into the room, unfazed by the horrendous beeping and buzzing of the vitals monitor next to the bed as everything finished fluctuating toward flatline. The ethereal calm of the man seemed to transcend the noise, even permeating the room as he reached out and placed a hand on Beast Boy's shoulder, interrupting him midway through muttered promises along the lines of 'never again if you just wake up,' and 'every single time if you just please don't leave me again.' Much as with Cyborg, the instant he touched Beast Boy, the younger guy froze as all the tension and stress left him in a cool instant, stranding him quite speechless after the sneak attack emotion draining.

"Try not to make any promises you can't keep, because she'll be fine, and you're going to have to honor them," muttered Skye calmly as he guided the green one away with the hand on his shoulder and took up the position he'd held next to Terra's bed. _That_ was what he'd said, and with the repetition, Robin felt the words slam home into his own mind. _She was going to be fine_.

"Wait, does that mean you know what's wrong with her?" asked Robin, suddenly terribly curious as he rushed into the room and took up the opposite position from Skye on the other side of Terra's bed.

"I've know what was wrong with her since I first peeked down here from upstairs with my spirit vision. I fully diagnosed the problem during the elevator ride. And now, if you'll excuse me for a moment, this part, at least, will only take a moment." Skye's voice was not arrogant, it was not condescending, and it was not lecturing… nor was it friendly, jovial, or pleasant. It wasn't much of anything really, and its emptiness, Robin suddenly realized, was what had changed so much and drawn his attention so fiercely. While he'd fluctuated rather oddly between all of those things the day before (lord, was it really only yesterday?) he'd always had some edge or another in his voice. Now… nothing. It was one of the creepiest things Robin had ever seen, and he marveled at this until he was given a much more immediate reason to marvel the next moment.

In a smooth motion, Skye flipped Terra onto her stomach, revealing the back of the bodysuit with its mysterious curve-hugging contours and odd metal studs that traced down her spinal column. Without a word of explanation, Skye held out his right hand, the intricate silver meshing of his glove and the enormous gemstone on the back of the palm sparkling in the bright fluorescent lighting. A glow of impossibly fine silver threads began around the gem, the infinite loops and spirals growing out at an alarming rate. In a moment, these strands, more like bundles of spider silk than ribbons as all the previous manifestations Robin had seen had been, had crawled forth to envelop Skye's right index finger in a glowing sheath of finely interlaced threads.

In one quick motion, Skye placed his gloved finger at the very bottom base of Terra's spine, just above the buttock, then swept it up her back in a slow, deliberate movement. Robin could see Skye's hand move as it bounced over every vertebral disk in her back, reaching the base of her skull after a long moment of this rhythmic motion. Having made it that high, Skye changed his grip, ever more threads pouring out and down his finger, seemingly flowing from his hand and into her body as he wrapped his hand around the back of her head so that his index finger was behind one ear and his thumb was behind another. The glowing reached crescendo, the threads flowing out in finely attuned waves that pressed into the back of Terra's skull and vanished within, then the whole process cut off at once. The vitals monitor read everything as perfectly fine, excepting of course the brainwave indicator, which had obviously never moved. Skye sighed heavily as he stepped back from the bed, then began to talk calmly, as though he'd just cleaned a toilet rather than saved someone's life.

"So…" began Skye, an inscrutably empty tone reminding Robin disturbingly of some of Raven's worse days, "Fill me in. I have a good idea of what happened here, but thorough postcognition isn't one of my powers." The request was made simply, and Robin geared up to respond as the last dregs of heart-freezing panic faded from his system. It seemed inconceivable that the situation could have changed so quickly from dire to 'fine' (sort of), but Skye had handled it like waking up to find someone's life in his hands was everyday business. Robin was impressed.

"Uh, right," he stumbled into his explanation as he continued to recover from his shock, "So Raven told us what you said, about watching her in case Slade had an extra surprise or two tucked away in her head. We put her down here and began treating her for malnutrition and extreme exhaustion," this received an agreeable nod from Skye, who'd retreated to a corner and had begun to check himself out as he listened, "and we set up a watch rotation to make sure she wouldn't be alone while the rest of us attended to other things. Cyborg suggested we put her downstairs in the quarantine room and shut it up tight, but I reminded him that it still hasn't been repaired after… well it suffered some damage a few weeks back that the contractors still haven't shown up to fix. Beast Boy wouldn't have stood for it anyway."

As Robin got into full dictation, the words seemed to flow as sort of an inverse effect to how worried he was. As it became clear that things might actually manage to turn out alright at last, he began to perk up noticeably, and this corresponded to an increasing talkativeness in Robin and quite the tale for Skye. The other guy, in the meantime, was stretching out his kinks, flakes of dried blood falling from his clothing and hands as he went through some kind of wake up ritual.

"The first three shifts went fine, without incident, but against protest of clearer heads, this guy," and he jerked a thumb at the green one, who still stood aside in disorientation from Skye's draining touch, "Stayed by her side through all three cycles, so that he hadn't had a lick of rest by the fourth, which started about ten minutes ago. I don't know if Slade had some kind of intelligence that told him this, or if he just had the devil's luck… _again_, but that was when Terra came to. She made her way downstairs and within three minutes had penetrated to the state-funded community supercomputer mainframe held here to keep it secure and support the Titan's crime tracking network. Just as he was about to score a major blow by trashing the place, Terra just… stopped. Cyborg has the videos if you need to see them, I don't know why but I was hoping—"

"That I'd know what had happened?" finished Skye as he pulled his black over shirt off, quickly followed by his bloodstained white tank top. "Yes, as a matter of fact, I can tell you exactly what happened, and then explain why she almost slipped off this mortal coil in the process."

He stopped talking for a moment, but Robin was so captivated by his systematic actions that he didn't mind the delay in getting in on his insights. He was doing the most morbidly fascinating things. When he'd pulled away his shirt, he revealed the tightly wrapped and utterly red bandages underneath, so completely saturated with blood that it looked like he was wearing some kind of crimson vest, the contrast shocking against his ghostly pale albino skin. Almost immediately he pulled a small, pencil-sized rod out of his belt. Twisting it, he caused a light to blip to life on one end, then ran the lighted end down the side of his bandage. It split like it had been cut with a razor, but the pieces clung to his front and back on the dried blood.

"Last night, when I could feel myself hinging on the border of oblivion from blood loss and massive overextension of my powers, I was able to scrape together some last few insights into what threats today would hold," he finally continued as he established a firm grip on the bandage and set his jaw in determination. With a grunt of effort, he tore the bandage, dried blood and all, completely off his body, yanking it around until he'd peeled off the clinging area on his back as well. His explanation was cut short by the deep breaths he swallowed down in an attempt to quell the pain, and Robin didn't blame him. He hadn't been able to keep from grimacing in sympathy at how much that must have hurt.

"Anyway," he picked up where he left off, "I got the feeling that all the dangerous compulsion programs still encased in Terra's subconscious were completely latent, there really isn't enough of a guiding consciousness left in her for anything more advanced than that."

"Oh…" Robin couldn't help but be a little put off by that news. He'd hoped the fact that she'd gotten up over whatever Skye had done to keep her down was good news in the sense that it showed there might be something left in her. So much for that. Skye continued to explain in that unsettlingly detached way as he grabbed a rag from the sink in the room's corner and wet it, beginning to rub down the awful purple bruises that had been under the bandages, apparently all that was left of his extreme injuries.

"So, naturally, I set up a mental block that would separate her subconscious controls from the rest of her system, stopping just short of affecting her automatic organic systems like breathing, heart beat, and the like. That was the best I could do to protect us from her in my weakened state, and its likely what held off that explosion of violence for so very long." Skye paused there to rinse out the rag after having moped off most of his upper body, the blood and grime draining into the sink as an almost continual flow.

"So if you had that covered, then why did you tell us to keep an eye on her, and _why_ was she able to awaken and bust up our home?" Robin asked, not unreasonably, but with an edge that was closer to the third degree than it was to friendly inquisitiveness. Skye didn't turn around as he answered, but rather pulled off those gloves of his (practically the first time Robin had seen this since he'd met the guy) and began to wash the blood and grime off of those.

"Unfortunately, that countermeasure only covered half of the potential threat I foresaw last night. Doubly unfortunate was the fact that, by that point, I lacked the power by far to lay a complete defense against the rest of it. Having little in the way of options, I did the next best thing… I placed a very discreet mental construction underneath my mental block as a sort of compromise measure." Robin was getting a little ticked at this guy again, getting the sense that he was being talked down to even though there was nothing in Skye's tone to suggest anything of the sort. Robin supposed it was more Skye's odd habit of speaking to people without facing them combined with just how much more he knew about all this than Robin did rather than any actual condescension, but that didn't stop the anger from manifesting.

"So, I don't get it, what was the compromise? What are you talking about?" and Robin's inquiry continued to gain heat, though Skye hardly seemed to notice considering how perfectly calm his response was.

"The secondary threat was that whoever perpetrated this… _disgusting_… _disfiguration_… (Robin's ears were almost stung by the enormous spikes of contempt and anger in these two words considering Skye's otherwise vacant tone) on your friend would come to investigate when his—for this is definitely a man's work—compulsions failed to bring her back into his clutches. I lacked the power to outright block a Telepath of this man's talents should he attempt remote access to her mind… I mean I was quite totally out of power by the time I was planning this last night. So instead I did the next best thing—I set a booby trap."

"Wait… you put a trap… in Terra's mind… to stop the guy who messed up her head from puppeting her around again?" Robin was less incredulous than he was merely confused, having no real experience with the subtleties of psychic combat. Skye finally turned back to him and this time had an expression on his face… a wide grin (that somehow still managed to express more a thought than an emotion).

"It was a simple trap, I couldn't manage much more than that at the end of my rope last night, or this morning, or whatever. However, sometimes it's the oldies that are the most effective, and if there's one thing I can say about a psi-burn trap, it's that they're effective."

"Psi-burn?" and Robin couldn't help but begin to mimic Skye's grin slightly as he started to realize why what he was explaining was a good thing rather than a confusing or concerning thing.

"Psi-burn is pretty well the most painful thing that can happen to a telepath. I can't really express what it feels like to someone who's incapable of ever experiencing it, but a rough analogy would be that it's not unlike having your brain popped out of your skull, impaled on a red hot poker, then reinserted, glowing metal spike and all. I can say with some certainty that it was the detonation of said trap that halted Terra's process toward the destruction of your mainframe. I can also say with some certainty that immediately afterward, whoever was riding around in her head was paralyzed in blinding, sanity-shattering pain, of which he could not have possibly deserved more. The major compromise I was talking about was simply that, in order to prevent it from being detected, I had to disguise it among the refuse of the poor woman's savaged personality, and this led to unavoidable delays in its activation."

"I see, so that's why you wanted us to watch her. You knew the telepath that broke Terra's mind would try to get her back and you needed someone to contain her while your booby trap took effect. Well, I guess we have no one to blame but ourselves that she got so close to causing irreparable damage to our systems… ourselves and _this guy_, that is," Robin said this almost happily, so completely overjoyed that things were at last going their way that he didn't even care about Beast Boy's blunder.

"You have quite a talent for insight Robin, I'm impressed," Skye complimented Robin as he finished up with his cleaning. "Now as for why she started to fade afterward, that would be an unforeseen side effect of my sadly jerry-rigged defense, and I blame myself that her body had to endure that extra trauma. As near as I can figure, the cocksucker who did this to her, before being expelled in a paroxysm of utter agony that he'd so richly earned for himself, managed to press out with some rather nasty mental strikes, one of which managed to nail her hypothalamus quite perfectly. As you're no doubt aware, that particular portion of the brain regulates a myriad of essential bodily functions automatically, and the trauma to it would have quite certainly led to her demise had you not gotten me up and down here. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to correct my mistake." And he was completely sincere.

"Woah, woah, I should be the one thanking you! In forty eight hours you've saved lives, protected the innocent, and stopped the bad guys in ways I never even considered possible! If you hadn't shown up, half of the people I care about in this world would be lying in fresh graves, including, if my suspicions are correct, myself! I have other suspicions too, ones that involve certain… dreams I've been having." He raised his eyebrows at the other, making it clear exactly what he meant. Skye continued to be inscrutable, but before he turned and started shaking out his shirts over the sink, Robin was positive he saw the slightest twitch at the corner of Skye's fixed grin. So it had been him.

"Seriously Robin," and at last there seemed to be some kind of feeling in Skye's voice, though Robin wouldn't care to hazard a guess at what it was, "you don't owe me anything. To actually work with people I can trust, people my own _species_, on my home world… it's been fantastic. Grievous injuries and power burnouts aside, I've never felt so alive in my entire _existence_. I guess what I'm trying to say is… if you want to pay me back… don't do it with accolades or the like. Just… you know, show me around, give me a place to stay… help me brush up on my hand to hand, that kind of thing. I have a feeling, and by that I mean a precognitive perception, that we don't have much to worry about in the way of villainous attacks in the moderate future. The actions of last night have cleared the board, and while the air still stinks with threat, there isn't a time tag on it anymore. For now, at least, we're in the clear."

"Really?" and Robin, though he already trusted this guy's words almost implicitly, couldn't help but wonder that they'd managed so much in one night. "I mean, god, I'd be glad to show you around the city, and I bet I could learn as much from you as you could from me, but do you really think Slade and those guys you're after are just going to sit around? I don't know about the others, but Slade's not the type to take defeat lightly. After this most recent attempt at payback was stopped, who knows what he might try?"

"My targets have had their operations crippled by Slade and your two buddies, they're going to lay low and lick their wounds, that's the type they are. As for Slade, I hear you, and though I've hardly had any contact with him, I agree with your assessment completely. However, I can tell you with some certainty that he's got more imminent problems on his plate than getting back at us. No, no," he waved away Robin's inquiry, "I can tell you all about it later, but there are other things to get to. I mean, I intend to have all kinds of fun on what's basically a working vacation away from my IDP taskmasters, but I've got a feeling I know what most of my time will be devoted to for the foreseeable future." It didn't take much of Robin's impressive perceptive ability to know who he was referring to, and the almost jovial atmosphere that had built up in the room evaporated as the subject returned to Robin's downed friend.

"So, I guess I've kind of been avoiding the subject," Robin began, his voice burdened by severity, "but I have to know… can you… fix her?" He braced himself for the answer as Skye considered the question in silence. The silence stretched out, and out, and then out some more before he finally responded.

"Well, I can't promise anything until I've completed a full diagnosis of the damage, but my preliminary prognosis stands. It won't be easy and it won't be fast, but her case is far from hopeless. I've known from the instant I laid senses on this woman that she was tough, a true survivor. In her own way, she's got more grit than you and I combined, and I doubt a little thing like having her body degraded, her soul raped, and her mind obliterated would ever manage to quell the spirit even now lying dormant within this shell."

Robin was speechless, but after a moment, he realized Skye was completely correct. Terra had survived on her own for an unknowable amount of her life, had weathered torture that the mere thought of already threatened to give him nightmares, and had now survived truly inhuman amounts of strain without even a mind to call her own. She would be fine, he could feel it now.

"Skye man, you have no idea what a huge relief it is to hear you say that," admitted Robin as he felt the world brighten, a weight lifting off of his shoulders, and a great deal of fatigue catching up with him all at once.

"Actually, I think I have a pretty good idea," Skye responded cryptically, tapping the side of his head to communicate that he had a decent idea how _everyone_ felt _all_ the time. "Anyway, there are a few more things I wanted to talk to you about, but I'm going to make it quick. You need sleep, _badly_, and don't try to deny it. I can tell these things about people."

So for about a half hour, Skye and Robin talked. They talked about how Skye felt about being on his homeworld for the first time in his life, and they talked about what he wanted to see while he was here. Robin asked how he'd managed to get his cloths clean and Skye explained again about synthar smart fibers. Robin asked what it was like seeing in every direction at once, and Skye admitted that it was utterly impossible to explain, managing to make the analogy of trying to describe color to the blind without being at all condescending. Skye asked what it was like to be surrounded by people that cared about him, people he could trust, and Robin explained that there was nothing quite like it.

Robin then asked about the new firearms Skye was sporting, giving the other guy a perfect opening to recount the fall of Slade the night before. Robin was tearing with laughter even as he almost glowed with envy as Skye described how he'd managed to get the drop on the villain, beating him to the ground at his moment of ultimate victory. Even after he explained the integral importance of complete surprise and Slade's towering overconfidence at the night's end, Robin still couldn't help but feel a little bested by the other man. He squished this feeling as one unworthy of someone who'd done so much for him, then gave him a rather grim warning about what tended to happen to people who stole from Slade. Skye took him completely seriously, but seemed undisturbed none the less.

As the conversation wore on and Robin's yawns became more and more frequent, they eventually came to the relationship between Robin and Starfire. Though he wasn't sure why exactly he felt okay about talking to a relative stranger on a subject he had yet to discuss with his closest friends, he none the less waxed quite eloquently about what an intense sensation love could be. Skye admitted his ignorance on the matter and whished them luck, but not before getting Robin to promise and remind him to give him a chat on comparative xenobiology before too long, as that was the kind of thing one would want to know in a relationship like that between the leading lady and most eligible bachelor of Jump City.

Finally, as he turned to leave and get some sleep, Robin noticed that Beast Boy was _still_ standing there in a daze, never having moved from where Skye had so gently placed him. Drawing Skye's attention to this fact (though he was positive the highly perceptive man had simply been waiting for him to notice) Robin asked what the heck Skye had done to keep B.B. quiet and unresponsive for forty minutes. Skye made a great show of examining the shorter, green furred man before 'noticing' that he suffered from something he called hypnotic hyper-susceptibility. Robin thought back to various encounters with Mad Mod and had to agree that this explained a lot about the guy. In any case, Skye woke him with a snap next to his ear—a much simpler gesture than what was usually required—and dissipated his confusion and time-displacement with the news that Terra was going to be fine.

As they waited for the young man to stop bouncing off the walls in joy, Robin commented that he should explain the good news to Cyborg as well. Skye responded that it probably wouldn't be necessary, then met Robin's confused look with a discreet point into the corner at the security camera there. Robin merely grimaced and nodded, promising himself to talk with Cyborg about his Big Brother privileges. That was it then, and Skye forced the two young men out with orders to get some sleep (it was closing in on noon after all). Beast Boy was reluctant to go, but Skye would have nothing of it, and an amusing little struggle ensued. When it got to the point that he was clinging to either side of the doorway with tentacles in his octopus form, Skye got fed up, snapped out the word 'eggs' and shoveled the suddenly panicking chicken out the portal, sliding it shut with finality. He left it to Robin to take it from there, and the leader took it upon his highly responsible shoulders to persuade B.B. to get to bed, implementing a tried and true technique involving a headlock and lots of shouting.

(Skye/Vera)—all dialogue is internal

"I had a feeling that compulsion would come in handy," Skye commented idly within his own mind as he turned from the locked door and sidled calmly back toward the hospital bed containing his newest patient.

"I'll just bet you did," Vera sighed into his mind with exasperation, something he'd been getting a lot from her as of late. "You knew this kind of thing would happen and you set that up on purpose." The accusation was not unreasonable, but Skye could not, in good conscience, let it stand. It simply wasn't true.

"Sorry Vera, I may have a good grip on the future, but I'm not that good. I got the sense that Beast Boy was the type to refuse to listen to reason, and this brought on a hunch that a mild control compulsion like that would streamline my dealings with him. I hadn't the slightest idea that what's going on right now was going to happen."

"I _don't_ see that as an excuse for manipulating him like that," and Vera's exasperation magnified palpably at the way Skye completely ignored the point about ethics she was trying to bring up. "You just go too far sometimes. Like that thing with Robin and Starfire… you really had no right."

"Don't start on that again Vera, I mean, did you see that guy? He's practically apoplectic with joy that their relationship finally exists. Would you really have had me keep my powers off such an idiotically hung situation?"

"I'm just saying that it should have been their choice. It's not your place to go around matchmaking and otherwise sticking your mind into other people's business!"

"Vera, _come on_, you say that like I climbed into their heads and forced them to love one another! I sense things that others don't, and those two were linked, mated on a level that transcends mere thought and biology. Their very existence is a universal expression of unity at the spiritual core of life, to continue to let circumstance keep them uncertain and apart would have been a far greater crime than any meddling imaginable. In the end, all I did was provide an environment outside of the fantastically inhibiting everyday life they lead here and let them notice what was so painfully obvious to me—so please, just drop it."

"Well… I still think you're taking a fantastic risk with their lives by involving them in your work here. If you hadn't freed me…" and now Vera became quiet, solemn to the very cove of her expression, "I would have already organized the report that would include death warrants for all of them, and you, and your sisters."

"Thus why I freed you. I've been pickling the IDP's checks and controls for the better part of a decade, and I'm not about to let them catch up with me so close..."

"Close? Close to what?" Vera pressed him when he trailed off to silence, and after a moment, he responded.

"It's getting near Vera, the moment when I snatch my sisters and make a break for it. The signs and quantum reality pathways are lining up like dominoes, and the grand prize of my life, my ultimate goal for longer than I care to remember, is finally within reach. As soon as we're done here, it'll be time to organize the full revolt of the IDP Involuntary Service."

"Are you sure? I don't pretend to understand what all that would involve, but there have been past revolts Skye, and nothing good ever came of them." Vera's concern touched Skye, and he appreciated the support immensely as he felt himself on the precipice of the rest of his life. Of course, all of this hinged upon his success here, something that was far from certain considering the presence of _that_ man and his ilk. Thought of his nemesis quite simply ruined Skye's contemplation, and brought him back to the present immediately.

"Never mind all that, it's a ways off yet. This should be the entire focus of my being for a while—this poor, poor woman. I'm not even sure I know where to begin on a case this bad, but I'll be damned if I'll let a travesty like this stand." Skye had turned from contemplative to determined, in that coolly reserved way of his, and Vera let the subject drop. She'd never seen him work on a mind before, not in the deep, precise way this would involve, but one thing she'd know since she was applying for partnership with him was that, in the whole of the universe, there were few better than he was at what he was about to do.

Suddenly, Skye's vitals took a weird dip, his pulse slowed, his blood vessels contracted, and generally his parasympathetic nervous organization took full control in his body. In her short experience as custodian of his body, Vera had already learned that this meant a single thing. He'd iced his emotions. She felt compelled to confirm this.

"Skye… did you just—"

"Yes."

"Umm… why?" Somehow, she couldn't help but feel like she was prying unnecessarily as he geared up to begin work on his patient, but she couldn't stop her curiosity. In the end, there was little else to take interest in considering her limited universe.

"I did what I could to hide it from Robin lest he worry, but I have to admit that cases like this disturb me enormously. It won't do for me to loose my composure while exploring delicate area's of Terra's mind. Now if you please, I'm going to get to work. Feel free to follow my notations." Skye's response was as icy neutral as his first words with Robin had been immediately after his awakening. The difference was that this was intentional while the earlier case had simply been Skye before he could work up a semblance of emotions (always hardest first thing in the morning).

"You're not going to use your gloves?" Vera added one last curious inquiry as Skye hovered his hands palm-down just inches over the prone woman on the bed.

"Please, I wouldn't dream of touching this young lady's mind with those mauls. This is no simple case of cerebral hemorrhaging, swelling, or other manifestation of blunt force trauma. This is an intentional disruption, a malicious and extremely violent and vicious attack upon the very fiber of her sentience, specifically targeted to destroy those parts of her soul that gave her personality and autonomous will while leaving intact her reflexes, problem-solving ability, and power focus. The gloves have come off now Vera, because this is the big leagues."

Skye's diagnostic dissertation as recorded by Vera

Today I'll be examining a young female humanoid type 37 organism from sector 24407.4. Her name is Terra and her case is a surgical mindwipe. This intentional violation of her mind was based upon a quite obvious utilitarian objective, that being to create a weapon out of a living, sentient being. However, as I now begin to delve into the deep detail of exactly which areas of her mind that were erased, overwritten, or mauled into oblivion, I must also admit a certain ulterior motive becomes apparent. The person—for despite extensive evidence to the otherwise, I must admit that it was a living being and not an emotionless machine that perpetrated this monstrosity—who executed the operation on her mind was not only out to create an emotionless killer out of a young woman, but also evidently trying to cause the maximum amount of suffering in the process. I thank my vampiric core for the ability to overcome the debilitating nausea this information would naturally cause me.

I draw this conclusion from the following evidence. First, there are clear tells that every telepathic incision and manipulation left jagged, uneven marks upon the psychic fabric of the subject's mind, indicating with absolute certainty that the subject was awake, fully conscious, and struggling hopelessly for the entire mindwipe process up to and including such a point as her consciousness was degraded into nonexistence.

Second, extensive tracts of damage to the midbrain and corresponding access pathways in the temporal, occipital, and frontal lobes have no evident purpose other than to have been exceptionally painful and terrifying. Each of these brain areas was struck at for other, purposeful reasons, but a significant amount of the trauma to her sentience was entirely extraneous.

Third and finally, the most severely damaged portion of the subject's brain, having sustained far beyond any necessary trauma, are her left and right amygdalate structures. These structures would necessarily require debilitation to ensure an emotionless soldier, being the areas most responsible for basic emotional responses to stimuli, but the extensive mauling they received disturbs me deeply, even under the influence of my PV. Such damage can only conceivably have resulted from extensive and _sustained_ emotional torture involving direct and extreme over stimulation of the amygdala, most likely to produce excessive terror.

Such treatment extends far beyond the bounds of cruel and unusual. Thusly I would like to pause this record momentarily to comment that, had I been aware of the nature of the person responsible for harming this young woman's mind, and equally, had I been possessed of enough psychic power at the time, the trap I set for him would not have merely singed his brain with overwhelming agony. I would have trapped him in a spirit snare, nailed his consciousness up in a tiny psychic prison, and then let his personality degrade until only a feral ghost remained. Then I would have destroyed the remains. This is the only fit punishment for such a travesty against the miracle of consciousness. I shall now resume.

To aid my future repair efforts, I will now begin a list of the damage and relative data to its effect on the subject's mind. As the objective of this mindwipe was to erase personality without affecting combat ability, the vast majority of damage would clearly be in those areas related to memory and higher reasoning capacity. Examination reveals this to be largely the case.

The temporal lobes of either hemisphere, centers of long-term memory control, have both been the subject of extensive activity. The general telepathic technique for locating memories, whatever one's desired use for those memories may be, is to trace from the hippocampus in the limbic system out through the temporal lobes and through the extensive networks of neurons all over the brain involved in encoded memory. The specific method of erasure in this subject's case is recall-pathway destruction, indicating a great deal of patience on his part, but not extreme power or artistry. Had he used recall-pathway scrambling or neuron destruction to wipe the memories, restoration would become difficult or even impossible. In any case, the obliteration of her memories, as in all cases of mindwipe, is the largest part of her loss of self, but not the core of the affliction.

As a side note to temporal lobe damage is the presence of extreme damage to language centers on the left hemisphere. It is my theory that this was the major route of access to the amygdala and hippocampus, and the telepath (though I hesitate to grant the animal such a lofty title) who engaged these manipulations seems to have made his greatest blunder here. Apparently, in his horrifying desire to blast her mind with terror, he used far too much power in these areas, and the result is the most severe case of general aphasia I have ever witnessed in a humanoid nervous center. While this easily explains the otherwise mysterious lack of verbal responses (which are usually quite standard in this type of manipulation) from Terra while taking orders from Slade, it also provides me with my deepest concern. Assuming everything else is fixable, or at least operable, I cannot say with certainty that this damage can be reversed, leading me to question if she will ever regain the ability to talk.

The next most seriously afflicted area is her forebrain, including the frontal lobe of both hemispheres. Here the destruction is much more restrained and surgical, and I feel obligated to express my surprise that the same disgusting _thing_ that could rape this young woman's amygdale could so precisely manipulate her frontal lobes. Engaging in what is best described as a kind of non-invasive prefrontal lobotomy, he removed with exceptional selectivity the neural pathways involved in personal willpower and high-level emotional processing. Here at last he shows uncommon ability, having acted with such precision as to eliminate the portions of the forebrain that control personal inhibitions while putting only moderate strain on those portions governing problem solving and high-level sensory processing. The person who did this work is surely then quite the dangerous opponent, and I feel myself fortunate that the rather poor trap I prepared earlier actually put a stop to him, however temporary.

With the elimination of the memories that constitute personality and the reasoning processes that constitute individuality, what one has left is a near-vegetative blank slate with nothing but the most primitive of organic needs to motivate it. In the process of telepathic reprogramming this is where the destruction ends and the reconstruction begins. This man-monster chose a rather typical template to complete the process that proceeds in a twofold manner.

In the first is a strategy of reconnecting all the intact physical capabilities into a central construction capable of mimicking the functionality previously reserved to the integration of memories with the active reasoning in the forebrain and other areas. This construction serves as a kind of control panel for the subject, voice activated to be unquestioningly responsive to certain persons, and then supported by extensive lists of compulsions to govern behavior in situations where a command-giver is not present. Through this method, the subject could be controlled with the utmost ease, Slade simply having to designate the opponents and give the order for Terra to fight with the maximum of her ability and base cunning unto death. This structure will have to be carefully removed as it is almost certainly trapped. In the interim period until I can reconstruct her personality, it may also be necessary to create a new structure of my own so Terra can function, in however limited a manner, to combat her malnutrition and other health issues.

The second form of control is an inhibition of the biological, engaged lest unconscious processes interfere in the subject's ability to follow orders. Through extensive manipulation of the brainstem, including a rather lengthy and unpleasant reconfiguration of the thalamus and spinal nerve gate, one can transform a mere slave mentality into a super soldier. The constructions here allow the subject to ignore pain, hunger, and any other conceivable organic demand from the body short of utter exhaustion (which causes unavoidable collapse). Without these things to concern her, Terra would quite willingly throw her life away in pursuit of the goals given her by Slade. No fear, no pain, nothing would stop her. This is my second greatest loathing, after the fact that this manipulation was sadistic in nature. To transform a sentient individual into a thoughtless automaton is one of the greatest crimes of all.

This concludes my diagnosis. My prognosis is: Good. With the possible exception of speech, Terra should make a full recovery with treatment. I will now proceed to dismantle and replace the control mechanism. End recording.

(Skye)

As he 'felt' the file being saved to his microcomputer implant, Skye reflected on why he kept up those logs as he rested his mind in preparation for the initial operation. He had a photographic memory, so it wasn't as though he himself would ever refer back to it, but there was still a very good reason to keep them. As one of the foremost telepathic surgeons currently living, it was his obligation to pass on his knowledge to others who might develop their own skills. The Galactic School of Telepathic Medicine, the place he'd learned his own basics, before he'd moved on to higher-order teachers and finally struck out to develop his own techniques and a personalized style, was always in need of additional source material, and Skye had been supplying as best he could as he sharpened his skills across the cosmos. His position in the IDP had him in contact with grievous injuries on a regular basis (his own, an unfortunate amount of the time, in fact) and so he took a little extra time out to expand the school's database of mental maladies whenever he came across a unique case like Terra's. The only problem he had with them was his habit of dictating from his personal stream of consciousness, requiring extensive editing afterward to get personal information and extraneous commentary out of the way.

In any case, he was finally ready, and so he organized his mind with the process of disassembling the control mechanism, stretched out his back and arms, then placed his hand gently on Terra's forehead. In a moment, his consciousness, rather than merely his senses, was deep within her mind.

Approaching with the utmost care, he examined the magnificent complexity of the control structure with an odd mixture of contempt and respect. He could feel nothing pleasant toward the living garbage that had destroyed this woman, but at the same time, he could not deny the precision work the control center represented. Wrapped tightly about the once-radiant jewel of spiritual energy that had been Terra's control core before her violent eviction from existence, the structure was a blood-red pustule pierced a billion times with interconnecting wires of thought energy. As he focused every fiber of his extensive concentration on the structure, he began to unravel the wires' purposes and connections. The task would have taken an eternity if he hadn't known exactly what he was looking at, his experience with such things allowing him to identify the wires in long braces and chunks, chewing through the inconceivable numbers inside of an hour. When he had a mental label for every single one, he disengaged momentarily to rest before moving on past the easy part.

Back inside Terra's mind, the control structure sat there like a malignant eye, staring out at Skye in defiance of its impending eradication. Ever wary of the traps he had a very distinct feeling that he would encounter, Skye began the process of disassembling it. As mentioned once, Skye had very little power to use direct telepathic force, it was why he was so dependent on the amplification gems. None the less, using what little ability he had, he was able to begin severing the crimson threads in vastly long tracts, working through them in a very specific order that would ensure there was no adverse effect on what was left of Terra's mind. This continued for about thirty minutes before he came to his first impasse.

While reaping through the connections that integrated her gross and fine motor controls with those compulsion strings and memories concerning combat tactics, he stumbled into the first trap. His danger sense was almost useless for such things, seeing as they contain no malicious psychic resonance to speak of, and so it was more a quick observation by his spirit vision, a slight inconsistency in the thread of power, that tipped him off before he sprung the deadly construction. After he finished dissipating the spike of panic (he'd let the draining fade and was working in a regular state of mind) he examined the trap and quickly discovered its nature. When he knew what it was supposed to do, he once again cursed the soul of the scum that had engineered this nightmare.

The trap was not designed to attack whoever tampered with the control structure, but rather to sabotage any attempt to reverse the villain's handy work by bombing Terra's mind. Had Skye tripped the trap, the control core would have popped like a rotting cow, saturating her mind with enough pure psychic force to liquefy her neurons. With the utmost of care, Skye disarmed the trap and memorized its structure to expedite discovering the others. There was no way this guy planted only one.

This went on and on, Skye only able to proceed at a rather deficient ten thousand threads per second because of the extreme but necessary hassle of examining each individual thread anew lest it hold an unwelcome surprise. With more than three billion connections… well, it took a while. However, it was not so long that Skye couldn't handle the continuous concentration, and just under an hour after he stumbled across the first trap, he had severed the last connection. Without any anchor in the maintaining energy of her life force, the knot of compulsions bundled around her control core disintegrated, the minute quasi-intellect within it screaming out in primal fury as its short existence was brought to a decisive end.

That task completed, Skye felt his fatigue catching up with him in a big way. His powers were still weak from the night before, and more than two and a half hours of sustained effort had left him on his last legs, but he had enough left in him for one last task. Drawing all the telepathic energy he had left into a single point of concentration, he pressed it out of his mind and into the void within Terra's. This was a technique he'd been perfecting himself for some months now, and the purpose was quite unique.

As the power struck the dull remains of Terra's control core, it instantly took form and blossomed outward in every direction. Shooting out vast webs of connecting filaments, it crawled forth from the core of her mind in a leaping, exponential explosion of motion. In seconds, it had formed into a brilliant doppelganger of her mind's previous occupant. This structure was not built to control however, rather it was a matrix of regenerative energy, radiating pulses of benign power that would prepare Terra's mind for the long process of reconstruction. Granted it would also serve the same purpose as the previous one had as far as linking together the disparate portions of her mind to allow her to fulfill simple commands, but Skye knew this would be essential. First, she would recover much faster if they could get her up and around and recovered from the extensive degradation of her body. Second… mind or no, Terra was a resource that might well prove vital in surviving the storm that had, due to their efforts the night before, been delayed for some unknown period.

As the core percolated away in her mind, Skye backed off and stumbled away from the bed. Drained beyond his ability to cope, he staggered across the room and fell into a chair. No sooner had he touched the chair than he'd passed out, entranced as his soul left his body to begin rebuilding his power… again.

Preview: So now we know what all is wrong with Terra. She's on the road to recovery, but what about the other Titans? How will they respond to having puppet Terra on their side while Skye pieces her mind back together? Much more interesting is the question of how Raven will cope when she wakes up and goes over everything that took place last night with a clear head. All this and more next chapter. I don't have a title yet.


	21. PIT pt2: Confrontation

Intro: I tried to cover a lot of bases with this one. Having wrung myself out on science fiction and action, dabbling in a little drama and angst seemed like a good idea. However, this is where my confidence in my own writing ability peters out… I can't say it's my favorite subject to write on, and I fear that may reflect somewhat on the quality. Then again, I actually wrote this and realized it wasn't half bad… so hey, maybe I'm not giving myself enough credit. Anyway, review and send me an opinion other than my own, I'd appreciate it.

Chapter 21 (Section 5, part 2): Confrontations

Raven's Room

Raven opened her eyes. For a moment, she was incredibly disoriented, the familiar accoutrements of her room doing little to counter the odd angle she'd slept in and the disgusting clinging sensation of the plethora of filth coating her body. Her mind raced for something solid to grasp onto, some anchor of memory or thought, dream or nightmare, anything that would give her some clue as to how much time had passed since she'd faded from waking consciousness, but there was nothing.

After a frantic, heart-racing moment of panic, she finally found the last moment of memory from the night before, and the world began to coalesce in her mind. Cyborg had helped her to her room, and after shoveling him out again she'd locked her door, stumbled to her bed, and passed out face first across it without even removing her cape, much less anything else. She'd slept the sleep of the dead, a dreamless instant of darkness connecting the moment she'd closed her eyes with the moment she opened them, and now her mind was finally overcoming the disorientation this caused to be left fresh and renewed. There was no sleep to rub from her eyes and no urge to roll over and return to the cradle of oblivion. In fact, there was a long and extremely pleasant moment where there was no urge to do anything at all. Then of course her night caught up with her.

The flood of memories hit her harshly, consuming her mind in chaos as all half dozen hours of it cried out for her attention and analysis at the same time. Groaning with the effort, she pressed all those memories, doubts, fears, pains, pleasures, and uncertainties into a box within her mind, shielding herself from the experiences as though they hadn't happened. The chaos was replaced by a nagging in the back of her head that would prevent her from disregarding them permanently, and suddenly she was clear to turn her concentration to her immediate and vital concerns.

She felt filthy. As she got up from her bed, a sickening peeling sound and sensation confirmed that she was indeed quite coated in grime and… other things. When she'd managed to get up to her knees on top of her bed, she waved a hand at the room in general and muttered something in an arcane language, compelling various lanterns and orbs in the space to light with a soft, ethereal glow. Scrupulously avoiding looking down at herself, she got her feet under herself and slid off her bed, making her way over to her vanity table. She wanted to take in the whole picture at once… it would save time.

When she finally got into view from the mirror, she realized it might have been a better idea to take it piece by piece. She felt her heart drop as she was overtaken by a variety of emotions that manifested by, ironically, cracking her mirror quite viciously down the middle. It didn't matter though, because she'd already had her own awful visage burned into her memory. As she stumbled over the horror of what she looked like, she rather morbidly tried to relate each marring to some event behind that shield in her mind.

For example, her own hair, always meticulously trimmed in the style she'd worn since her childhood in Azarath, was now a complete mess. Utterly caked with dirt and muck, it bloomed in every direction due to a combination of the heavy sweating and her having fallen asleep with her hood on. In her own opinion, she looked like a heard of cattle had mistaken her head for a salt lick.

Moving down to her face, she couldn't quite handle what she saw. The layers upon layers of grime she'd accumulated by running through dust clouds of a fallen building and hiding in piles of rubble had congealed into a panoply of scum which had enjoyed several hours of her rubbing it against her sheets in her sleep. The result was a swirling mess of gray, orange, black, and every imaginable intermediary all spread around her face. What really got to her, what sent harsh feelings scratching against the cage she'd placed them in, were the tiny etched pathways of clean skin in the dirt layers, the ones trailing from her eyes and down her cheeks.

She quickly shifted her focus to her cape and leotard, the blue and black combo having taken quite the beating over the course of the night. Severe exertion was what the material it was made from was designed for, but what it had faced the night before had been beyond extreme, and it showed this quite clearly. Her cape was ruined, the multitude of stains telling a story of industrial chemicals, construction materials, and copious bleeding (none of which she'd contributed). Her leotard was almost rigid with the meshing of sweat with grime, the whole thing gone to a sort of gray dappled with brown and black from the dust that had settled on her after the building fell. As she moved, there was a grinding and grating sound accompanying the multitude of rough patches against her skin, and so she tried her best to remain still as she looked down at her legs.

It turned out that every drop of blood she'd lost the night before had come from a series of bad scratches sustained during her duel with the robot assassin dogging Skye. The markings had all scabbed over now, crusted red trails dug dully into the gray grimy layers covering her legs. Her boots were also a complete loss, the trip she'd taken through that disaster site leaving them so coated in scratches, dust, and grime that she pretty well decided to ditch them the second she laid eyes on them.

In disgust, she flipped off her cloak, dropping it to the ground as she realized something was wrong with her hands as well. Despite moderate efforts on her part earlier to remove it, she still had deep red stains on her flesh where Skye's blood had seeped into her skin. She was disgusted, the red stains trailing up to the still-encrusted coating of red that crowded around each of the gems buckling her sleeves down and so on up her wrists. Frantic to get it off, she unbuckled her wrists and began trying to pull of the leotard, the crusted, clinging, stiff material completely refusing to comply. Figuring the give room in the back was clogged with something, Raven resorted to desperate measures, so much was her stomach turned by the sensation against her skin.

Charging her body with her power, she shifted her flesh sideways through reality, sliding out of her cloths in an instant and leaving them behind on the floor, almost standing on their own in a pile. Moments later she was in her bathrobe, brushing some of the grime out of her hair as her mind moved on to other things.

Terra. Now that the immediate crisis of her being was past, her terror for what had happened to the other woman resurfaced with a vengeance. As soon as she'd separated enough clumped grime out of her hair to get it all going in the same general direction, she threw her brush onto the vanity with its shattered mirror and phased herself through space.

In a flash of black energy she was standing on the medical floor, barefoot and wearing nothing but a bathrobe. This somehow failed to imprint on her as her heart continued to race with concern, the total lack of anyone around being more of an unappreciated boon than a circumstance to give her pause. Traveling immediately over to the only room with any occupants, the room radiating Skye's energy like an intangible breeze, Raven advanced without the slightest thought until she was standing at the door. Finally, she was given pause by the play of that silver power across her aura.

For some reason, she couldn't resist the urge to answer that call with power of her own, the almost tantalizing waves of energy sifting through space evicting a strong reaction from her aura. As she felt her own power raise in response to his, coating her body in a black cloak with fizzing white edges, pulling forth the white glow from her eyes and focusing in dark pools around her hands, she stopped only momentarily before phasing through the door and floating right into the room. Hovering inches over the floor, she began to take in her surroundings.

Terra lay peacefully on the hospital bed, Skye's power radiating off of her like heat off a baked highway. Skye himself was passed out in a chair next to the door, and it took her only a moment's examination to recognize that his body was vacant. Freed from the subconscious but powerful fear of being confronted by him looking like she did right now, her focus returned fully to satisfying the terror plaguing her heart.

Hovering over to the side of the bed, still cloaked in her black energy, Raven turned fluorescent eyes down to examine what Skye had done so far. The radiance was a throbbing vessel of his energy centered in Terra's skull, and as she looked closer Raven felt her breath stolen by the striking construction nestled between Terra's ears. It was the single most complex psychic structure she'd ever laid senses on, and it throbbed with such a healing force that her mere proximity to it was a soothing presence in her mind. Pulling her senses away from it, Raven looked back at Skye, a terrible uncertainty planted in her, even as her fear for Terra evaporated.

Raven had only to look at Terra's face, a single glance telling her that her friend was far better than before, despite her ongoing lack of a sentient consciousness. This was so certain because, replacing the dead, empty, and slack visage of the previous night, the one Raven had feared would haunt her (blessedly absent) nightmares, was the slightest, but oh so meaningful, smile. It was this that eased her fear, and she whispered a silent thanks to Skye's empty shell as she felt that pain dissipate.

However, at the same time, she felt a new uncertainty blossom. Skye had done something Raven hadn't even considered possible, performing the kind of high-level telepathic surgery that surpassed anything in her experience. Spiritual healers and their ilk were a dime a dozen in this cosmos, the talent as natural as any other manifestation of psychic ability. However, this time Skye had done something _unique_, something utterly _special_, and it frankly put Raven off harshly. It made her question once more just who the hell they were dealing with.

Granted this was no longer a question of trustworthiness, he'd proven in blood and fire just how dedicated he was to maintaining the trust they'd vested in him after all. Nor, really, was it a matter of frightened distancing as it had been when she couldn't get herself to stop panting over him, when she'd thought she was loosing her mind. None the less her questions persisted, her suspicions refused to rest, and slight fears flared unavoidably when she thought of him.

What exactly did they have in his mysterious young man from space? Where did he learn all these abilities, all these languages, so very much more than it seemed possible for anyone to learn in a few years of life? What was his mysterious connection to her, and why did he seem like so very much more than what he presented himself as? Considering how very much he surpassed what seemed humanly possible, was he even Terran like he claimed?

By all accounts he seemed like a human from Earth, but he hid so very much that Raven, a past master of concealing personal information, couldn't help but feel concern over it. After all, 90 of what she hid from others was a tissue of horrors so extreme that she herself couldn't quite handle them. What did that say about this guy? How might his secrets come back to make them all suffer like hers threatened to?

It was this last question more than any other that motivated what she did next. Hovering over to him, she descended until she was directly next to him. So close that she could smell the persisting odor of blood and sweat on his body, noticing the way it mingled with the same smell on her own, she looked into him with every shred of ESP she could muster.

Unlike the night before, this most recent effort of his had drained him to the point that his soul had dimmed, so much power had he expended. Now, when she looked at his aura, she did not see a blinding silhouette of utter masculinity, but rather the very surface and structure of his being. Much as her soul was twisted by the taint of her father's influence, mutilated far from anything a mortal person should possess, he too was deviant. Skye's spirit was all wrong from every angle Raven's mind could tackle it from. Her ability to tell such things was not as practiced as Skye's, but she was well read on what constituted the true aura of a human being, and Skye… well he didn't seem to qualify.

He had no demon's mark, no distortion that would give him up as child of either the upper or lower planes, but none the less he was not possessed of anything describable as normal. Rather than the enhancement of human form that would represent the spirit of any given hero, or the twisted form that would describe a monster, Skye had a sort of… slanted soul. On his left there was a normal spirit, pristine in its organization and magnificent in its purity, but otherwise not out of the ordinary. On his right… his right defied Raven's ability to understand.

It was as though the right side of his soul was an empty vessel filled by a swirling silver energy. There was a soft white edge to it, but it was otherwise transparent, Raven able to pick up the dull blank lifelessness of the chair behind him right through his soul in those places where that swirling power parted in its extensive dance through his body. The chain-like starbursts of energy spun in almost serpentine chaos throughout the blank right side, twirling about one another in a symphony of continual motion that was almost entrancing. Raven had never even imagined a soul like that, and she snapped back from him in confusion and uncertainty as her curiosity threatened to transform once more into mistrust.

"Skye, I owe you so much now, but… there will have to be a reckoning," she whispered out loud into the empty room, her voice echoing oddly as the power still surrounding her body interfered. As though in response, Skye began to stir, and Raven could feel his consciousness reentering his body. Deciding discretion was still very much what she desired, she retreated through space, evaporating back up to her room in a cloud of black energy.

Outside of that cloud of his power, her energy calmed down again, and she was once more a dark young woman in a powder-blue bathrobe. Her mind abuzz with new thoughts, not to mention the nagging sensation of all the things from the night before still demanding her attention, Raven grabbed a towel and some various other toiletries. It would be no use thinking about anything before she'd showered.

Titans Tower Common Room, some minutes later

Starfire glided gently into the Tower's main room, sleep still burdening her eyes, a blanket clenched tightly about herself. At some point during the haze of sleep she'd been drifting in and out of, a certain new urge had become far more prominent than her exhaustion. Now she made a direct, if rather sluggish, flight line for the refrigerator and dining alcove. The blanket billowed around her like a drapery as she shifted slowly across the room's airspace, oblivious to anything but a lethargic urge to fill her stomach. Considering her exhaustion then, it was perfectly understandable that she didn't notice the room's other occupant.

"Good morning!" snapped a rather chipper, if simultaneously quite exhausted, voice. Starfire nearly fell out of the air, so utter was her surprise, and while she caught herself before even almost hitting the ground, her startled jerk was more than enough to shred her blanket with her super strength. She twisted around in midair to get a face to go with the unfamiliar voice, and when she finally did catch sight of him, she drew a complete blank.

"Or rather… good afternoon," he continued, Starfire's mind too muddled with sleep to even make a decision on weather to be wary of this guy or not. He certainly didn't seem threatening, sitting at the kitchen table bent over multiple small metal pieces of something he'd been working on. Starfire got the distinct impression that she knew him from somewhere, and she searched her mind for some answer as she landed next to the table, determined to meet his ongoing pleasantries in kind. "I'm sorry if I startled you, I'm still a little frazzled myself, so I can understand your surprise."

"Ah… yes, _harek'tor narat_," she began, unthinkingly greeting him in Tamaranean as he stood up from what he was doing and turned to her. She realized her mistake and made to repeat herself in English when he cut her off.

"_M'tar buseth_," he came back with the tradition response to her greeting, then utterly stunned her by continuing with, "_apant miran chel'kit narat un ginbar tisif_?"

"Uhh… I believe I could be feeling better on this morning friend, but it is quite kind of you to inquire," she replied in English, her head pierced by an unexpected ache as she began to recall some of what had been going on the past two days. Hearing him speak her tongue in that odd accent of his brought back phantoms of memory from a strange land she didn't recognize, but those were quickly overcome by the flood of true memories, and she got her head back in order quickly after this.

"Yes… Yes, new friend Skye, I apologize for my distance," she told him as she tried to blink the sleep from her eyes and run her fingers through her long, disheveled hair, "my endeavors of the previous night have left me, as you said, 'frazzled.' I am impressed, you speak my language quite well."

"Oh, I speak a lot of languages, though I could never seem to get my r and k sounds right for that one. Naught the vocal cords for it. Anyway… are you alright? Your spirit's a little off-kilter."

"Alright? I am—NO!" and Starfire nearly choked as his inquiry reminded her of something she was terribly concerned about. "Please, you must tell me—" and there was evident panic in her disturbingly weak voice, "how is Terra? Is she—" but Skye cut her off with an upraised palm as he leaned back in his chair and rested his back.

"I have already taken care of Terra. You have nothing to worry about on her part, she's doing as well as anyone with that much damage to her mind can possibly ever do. I'm much more concerned about you, your soul is displaying a dangerous energy depression. What's the matter?" Starfire put a hand to her head to try and bestill the throbbing her panic had brought with it, but felt an incredible amount of relief at Skye's assurances

"Uh, I did the 'overdoing' of my power in the previous night's operations," she responded sluggishly through the haze of pain in her head. "I was suffering from _mistraska_ for some time. I feel I have recovered somewhat…" and she paused to catch her breath and balance on the ground, "but I awoke quite hungry…" and she wobbled badly once more before coming to a better balance, "and that's why I am here—ohh!" As she finished talking, she was overcome by a wave of fatigue that literally took her off her feet, dropping her backward. Rather than a stinging impact with the floor, Starfire witnessed an incredible blur of motion pass before her, and there was suddenly a supporting arm holding her up from the ground. Skye had cleared the table and caught her before she'd gotten halfway to the floor.

"I see, that would explain the depression in your life force, _mistraska_ is a very serious affliction you know," he said nonchalantly, as though he wasn't the only thing supporting her weight just then. With reserved flare, he helped her into a chair at the kitchenette's table, then walked over toward the fridge while she tried to comprehend what had just happened to her.

"Just sit tight, I'll whip up something that'll make you feel better," Skye said calmly, placing his hands against the fridge mysteriously. "If I'm not mistaken, you're in need of… hmm… reaction mass and catalysts for type 31894-C organic cold fusion. So… sodium, chlorine, acetic acid, carbohydrates, protein, sugar, aluminum, tin, iron… and… chocolate."

"My but that sounds wondrous!" Starfire squealed, exhilaration overcoming exhaustion momentarily as he described it, and that was all the cue Skye needed to make it happen.

Grabbing a plate out of a cabinet and some spoons out of a drawer, Skye began to rush around the kitchen area like he'd been cooking there for years. Raiding the fridge, he nabbed some chocolate ice cream, raw potatoes, fresh horseradish, leftover roast, and a big bottle of mustard, then poured them out in a heap on the counter while Starfire looked on. In a blur of confident motion, Skye scraped ice-cream out over the roast beef and began slicing potatoes and horseradish over the mess with a tiny pairing knife from a drawer. Next he flipped out a bottle of straight vinegar and ran it over the top as, with his other hand, he popped the top off the salt shaker and dumped it out over the middle. Discarding both now-empty vessels, he hefted the laden plate around to the dining table and set it in front of the still rather bewildered young woman, placing the mustard next to it in turn.

"That should do for the reaction mass," he commented offhandedly, oblivious to the ravenous hunger gleaming in her eyes and the trail of drool tracing its way down her chin as she stared slack-jawed at what he'd served her, "but we're still going to need some catalysts for the organometallic matrices."

There was no verbal response from Starfire as Skye turned back and began examining the kitchen area again. Instead there was a snarling, chomping, slobbering sound not unlike a pack of wild cats tearing apart a freshly slain antelope. The sound hardly seemed to bother Skye as he rummaged through drawers and cabinets, collecting a rather odd assortment of everyday items in a new heap on the counter. When Starfire finally pulled her head away from the completely, utterly clean plate, she turned to see Skye hard at work again as she began to wipe her face clean with the back of her hand and lick up the remains of her meal from there. It was only after she finished washing it all down with several long pulls straight from the mustard bottle that she finally took a break.

"That was truly a delightful dish friend Skye!" She exclaimed unreservedly as she stared curiously at his back. It was odd how much better she felt after that meal, but he was certainly right that it didn't feel quite complete. Resigned to go along with the ride this guy had so brusquely pressed her onto, Starfire sat in silence, drinking down the last of the mustard as she shifted nervously in her seat, trying in vain to determine what the heck he was doing now.

To the best she was able to determine, he had gotten together all kinds of metal and an empty glass, and was now doing something that was causing bright flashing lights to dance on the wall in front of him. It sounded like the buzzing of machine tools that was always screaming out of Cyborg's workshop, and there was the faintest odor of ionizing metal, as though he were grinding down a piece of steel. It turned out that she wasn't that far from being correct.

"Okay, here you go," and Skye turned around to present a glass a quarter of the way full of metallic powder which he proceeded to top off with water. When he moved aside to get the water, she spotted the debris of what looked like aluminum cans, a sheet of tin foil, and an old frying pan that had been rusting in a corner somewhere, all partially destroyed. Turning back, he drew attention again as he placed a hand over the top shook it fiercely until the powder actually began to dissolve into the water in a swirling sparkling mass, so finely ground it was. "This should get you restarted with a real kick. Personally, I prefer my heavy metals in moderation, but then again, I don't have a multi-purpose metallurgical plant in my intestines, so I guess I shouldn't comment."

"Is that?" she tried to ask, but he anticipated her question and nodded it silently away. "Because if it is…" she persisted as she rolled her eyes, "I _truly_ don't enjoy that particular remedy…" and she trailed off as she blanched at memories of downing the sparkling water in her youth, placing her face in her hands to fend off the visions. Her spirits were dropping faster than mercury in dry ice, and Skye didn't seem to even notice, much less care.

"It's just a little homemade Tamaranean fire water, and I'm sorry but it's exactly what you need to feel better. Agreed it's got quite a kick to it, I mean, approximately 20 of the reaction catalyst goes straight into the bloodstream. I believe the condition is called—"

"Yes, I know it well," Starfire muttered with unusual dismay, peeking out from behind her hands at the glass that awaited her. Her good mood from brunch was definitely evaporating as he waved the hated medicine around in front of her. "It is called _pramorchet_ _hrat'nal_."

"ha hahah ahah!" he shocked her with a blast of subdued laughter, "you really call it that?" Skye practically burst with humor at her words, and she gave him an appropriately bitter glare to express what she thought of him being able to laugh considering the situation she was in. He met her frumpy look with a calm smile and a slight sigh of exasperation.

"Please now Starfire, let's not be childish about this," he begged her patience in a voice suspended oddly between indifference and compassion. "I know these things are far from pleasant, but you wont get truly better anytime soon without replacing the metals your body needs to catalyze the star-energy effect and rebuild lost muscle mass. I mean, what if the man of your dreams walked in and asked you to go out on a date with him tomorrow? In your condition, you'd probably pass out halfway through dinner."

As he said this, Starfire caught her breath in shock, her hands reaching up to clamp over her mouth and cut off any further exclamation as her mind was pierced by the memories still blurring and swarming in her head. Behind her eyes, a scene played itself back through a rose colored mist, a scene so magnificently significant that she couldn't conceive of how she'd managed to avoid thinking about it until now, a scene of Robin asking her out after that strange dream that had connected their hearts at long last. The date had been set for Friday… the next day. Though the past day's many trials had given her little time to put thought into this, it was out of the bag now, and it had quite a pronounced effect.

As she sighed in helpless abandon, her pulse began to race, new warmth permeated her whole body and culled the last remnants of last night's deep-core cold, spreading upward into a blush that doused her face under her hands. Utterly distracted, she stared directly through Skye's head as he came to sit across the table from her, basking in the inner heat as everything outside became beside the point.

A drink was placed discreetly in front of her, and she picked it up and downed it in two long gulps without even glancing at it. Sliding the glass away from her as she returned to her star-struck reverie, there was at first no reaction. Now, love may conquer all, but chemistry has this annoying habit of happening no matter what, and it can be assumed that the pause was due to the inherent delay in metal particles passing through blood vessels and into cells. In any case, the kick hit the next moment, and her distant eyes lit with green fire like two flood lamps screaming out their harsh glare.

When the stinging pain burst forth all along her throat and stomach, she winced away from her pleasant fantasies and brought a harsh fist down on the table, coughing violently a few times as her blow splintered the table down the middle. Coughing some more, she was overcome by the rush of power to her head, beams bursting out from her eyes to blast a smoking crater in the floor. She continued to cough for some moments before the fit settled, and as she began to gasp heavily in an attempt to cool her throat, she noticed a casual hand on her back rubbing expertly to aid her breathing.

She had no concept of how long Skye had been standing there helping her through the fit, but the circumstance did not go unappreciated. It was just about enough for her to forgive him for slipping her the medicine, at least when combined with the fact that, as she'd known she would, she now felt nearly 100 better (besides the burning pain), all the fatigue and dizziness completely gone. As the vicious heat in her throat began to cool, Skye chimed in with some solemn words.

"Well, that was really something. I've read all about it, but I've never seen it actually happen to someone before. I guess _that's_ why you call it, _pramorchet_ _hrat'nal_… thermonuclear heartburn."

"It matters little, the worst is past… thank you," Starfire whispered coldly, her voice still slightly hoarse. She felt oddly uncomfortable, the entire exchange seeming to have been in some way manipulated by the young man next to her, even though there wasn't the slightest indication that he'd had anything but her best interest in mind. It left her more than a little confused, not to mention upset, and she enjoyed the sensation of her body beginning to pulse with energy again as she mulled it over in silence.

Skye accepted her thanks in similar silence and began to clean up the wreckage of the table, lifting the crumpled halves up and doing something to the bottom. There was that flashing light again, and when he got out from under it, it stood in place as sturdy as it had ever been. Comfortable in the enduring silence, he placed the tool he'd used into his belt and bent over again to pick pieces of what he'd been working on off the floor. In moments he was seated again and quietly working as he'd been before Starfire entered, making Starfire _exceptionally_ uncomfortable.

No one had ever ignored her in her entire life, and she found Skye's sudden, utter, and enduring lack of interest extremely disturbing. Everywhere she'd ever been, every humanoid she'd met had either been anxious to get to know her or intolerably rude, nasty, and cold. It wasn't that she _expected_ him to come on to her or something (her mind just didn't work that way) but having never known anything different, his politely distant attitude was unsettling, if refreshingly out of the ordinary. Shocked out of her dark contemplations, she decided that for once in her life, she'd have to be the one to initiate dialogue with a member of the opposite gender.

"Umm, friend Skye, might I ask how everyone is? I have been sleeping quite soundly and was not capable of discovering the health of all before my own injuries overtook me this morning." She smiled warmly as she spoke, giving him her best and most open expression in the hopes of interesting him in a conversation. He didn't look up from the mechanical bits he was tinkering with, but he did pause in his work to place his index finger against his temple and frown in concentration for a moment.

"It would seem that Robin and Beast Boy are asleep in their rooms as I requested. Neither had had a single wink of rest until I myself got up and insisted, but they were more than willing to pass out once I started my preliminary reconstructive work on Terra. Cyborg is a little more difficult to track, all those synthetic body parts mask his aura, but I'm rather certain it's him down in the machine shop working on something or other. Raven is… ah, she's in the shower down the hall. As for health status, now that you're feeling better, everyone should be fine and ready for action again by dinner time tonight."

His comprehensive and specific answer complete, he rolled a kink out of his neck and went back to work. Starfire blinked a few times as she absorbed both what he said and the fact that he was so casually able to locate everyone and know what they were up to. She made a small sound of curiosity when she was done considering _that_ one, and Skye perked an ear up, once again failing to look away from his task.

"Might I inquire as to what you are working on so seriously friend Skye?" she asked, more and more trying to locate some common ground on which to expand the budding kinship she felt for this mysterious fellow. The distrust and resentment that had threatened to rear up and isolate her from him had evaporated as she returned to normal, healthy feeling and got back to her usual state of mind. Her record of interaction with him so far had been quite poor considering the constant medical aid he provided, and she was determined to make him understand her gratitude, even though he insisted that she owed him none. If this one didn't work, she'd play her trump and talk with him about space travel and other planets, something that was guaranteed to be as much of an interest to her as to him. The others weren't much company when she felt like discussing the swamp moons of Caladan III, the pleasure satellites (read: moon-sized theme parks) orbiting Mislan, or any of the other worlds she'd visited, and Skye definitely seemed well-traveled enough to appreciate such conversation.

"Oh, this? This is nothing really," Skye disclaimed coolly in response to her question, continuing to poke at the unrecognizable metal bits as he went on. "I filched this firearm and its twin off of Slade after I put out his lights earlier. Unfortunately, the man had quite an ingenious security failsafe built into them, and I'm currently trying to disarm it. Are you really interested in this?"

His question was polite in the extreme, and Starfire realized that he was giving her a chance to back out before he started bombarding her with technical details and a full demonstration. Her desire to show a friendly interest conflicted momentarily with her complete ignorance of mechanical devices, and in the end it was her friendly nature that won out. Well aware of his penchant for lecture, she still nodded for him to detail what he was working on, beaming at him in genuine attentiveness.

Without delay he launched into an explanation of the security device built into Slade's fantastically fine firearms. He explained that powerful sensors in the grip could determine the exact identity of whoever was holding it by taking constant biorhythm readings. He told her that the act of pulling the trigger before the gun recognized your biorhythms was liable to be the last use one ever made of one's fingers on that hand. When she asked how this could be, he flashed her the slightest smile and flipped out the intact twin to the gun he'd pulled the guts out of.

Holding it delicately by the revolving chambers, he wordlessly obtained a brace of teaspoons from a nearby drawer and placed one between each of his fingers, so that they stuck out like claws when he made a fist. Three spoons extending, he passed the top one through the trigger guard and placed the other two along the grip where the rest of the fingers would be.

"Sit back, and remember that the carpal bones of the human hand _aren't_ comparable in durability to stainless steel." His calm warning piqued her interest, and she found herself quite focused on the spoons he'd put forth for his demonstration. Without further explanation, he used the spoon to depress the trigger with a pronounced CLICK!

Nothing happened, and Starfire had a surreal moment of confusion as she listened to a whirring sound from the gun. The uncommon afternoon silence was so pristine that she was able to hear the mechanisms prep as the trap's one second delay took place. The next instant there was a crack so like a gunshot that Starfire blasted reflexively backward into the air with a squeal of surprise, knocking over her chair in a clattering jumble that masked the sound of the gun rattling on its side where Skye had lost his grip and dropped it. After that spree of blazing action, the room was completely still again, and there was only a faint noxious smell and Skye's fixed grin to indicate that anything had happened at all.

As the world began to come out of the freeze frame her blast of adrenaline had prompted, Starfire noticed where Skye's gaze was focused the same moment she heard three separate, distinct metallic tones, as though huge coins had been dropped one at a time to rattle to a stop on the ground. The headless spoons in Skye's hand then were equally a testament to the power of the booby trap as the hang time the severed pieces had achieved.

"Oh wow…" Starfire was quite honestly in awe of the display as she floated back down to the ground and righted her chair, then joined Skye in sifting through the aftermath.

Her eyes were drawn first to the cleanly sheared spoons, which might as well have been cut on a precision laser considering how perfect the slices were. The gun lay on its side on the table, the grip had split cleanly down the middle and ejected two long blades in twin, cleaving arcs. The first blade had stopped when it struck the main section of gun, flush against the barrel, perfect position to ensure a clean cleavage of all four fingers. The second blade came out immediately opposite, had stopped at the horizontal with the other blade, and would definitely have taken care of the thumb, a good chunk of palm, and possibly even could have split the wrist right open. Starfire felt herself become a little pale at the thought, even during the wars she hadn't been fond of witnessing extreme mutilations.

"The trap triggers with invalid depression of the firing mechanism," Skye explained as he disassembled this one too, moving over it with quick and precise applications of that tool of his that had it into pieces in moments. "It takes just over one second for the gun grip to prime, splitting open exactly .47 SU (lets say… 1/10 of an inch) along a perfect seam with over 200psi of force. The blades are launched by the firing of a tiny blasting cap of the special chemical propellant common to everything I pulled off of Slade. That's what caused the distinctive explosive noise, and that's why the blades strike with such force. On the other hand, that's also why it only has a single discharge before requiring an obnoxiously long reload. In all, it sacrifices the reusability and convenience of springloading for extreme miniaturization, a whole lotta bang, and a hell of a delivery. The customization on this thing is really epic, and this modification is consistent…"

On and on Skye went, talking in a lively tone, as though there was nothing more interesting in the world than what he was doing. As he began to become highly technical, Starfire lost the thread of what he was saying, focusing instead on the deft manipulations of that mysterious little tool that he used to work the guns. Though apparently just old-fashioned mechanical solid slug weapons, the guns turned out to have dozens of pieces, many of them ridiculously small, all of which fit inside the handle around the explosion driven trap. Because she was wondering about this, one snippet she did catch was his comment on the advantages, disadvantages, and demonstrative technical superiority of the components this type of trap showed, but that was about the last thing she was able to follow. She was quickly about as lost as she'd ever been during Cyborg's new tech demonstrations, and there was really no way for her to hide this.

"…And that's why the explosive caps don't interfere with the sensitive electronics or the micro power source. Really these are the finest examples of solid-slug hardware I've ever laid hands on… and I'm boring you out of you skull." Skye shocked her out of her mesmerized focus on his hands with his sudden, neutral accusation. She sputtered a denial, but stalled in the face of his knowing smile. Blushing in embarrassment, she let the silence express her apology as he finished up his tinkering, placing a final locking rod into place with a distinctive snap.

"Well, thanks for being an ear anyway, you'd be shocked at how few and far between even someone to fake an interest can be in my line of work. You'd figure spending so much time alone in space would have tempered my tongue, but everyone I know tells me I talk too much." Skye didn't seem at all bothered by Starfire's gaff, and she allowed herself to calm down a little as she realized this. Skye, rather than perusing that line of conversation any further, he stood up, picked up the two guns, spun them through a few dozen spectacular loops, juggled them spinning from one hand to the other, then holstered them with practiced ease. Or at least, he slid them into his belt without too much obvious discomfort.

"Oh but that was wonderful!" Starfire exclaimed, and the silent room was filled with the sound of clapping and the brilliant laughter of a beautiful young woman, Starfire expressing what she felt without reservation. Most men would have been daunted by those sparkling eyes and the sheer blinding force of that much concentrated feminine charm, but Skye weathered it like a mountain in a stiff breeze, growing a new and different slight smile under those all-concealing sunglasses.

"Oh, that was nothing, just a little basic gunplay. You should see what I can do once I get some real holsters. Anyway, I've been wondering—" but Starfire would never find out what he was wondering about, because he held his tongue suddenly and looked over to one of the room's two hallway access entrances. She reflexively turned to follow his gaze, but there was absolutely nothing there, and she turned again to look at him in confusion.

"Skye?" she probed innocently, "might I inquire at to the cause of this unusual interruption?"

(Skye)

"_Hello Raven… good afternoon,_" Skye 'pathed her as soon as his senses made him aware that she was listening in on his chat with Starfire. He'd been using his power to keep track of her, as well as all the others, in the back of his mind, something he did reflexively whenever he wasn't working alone (admittedly not that often).

"_…'lo_," she eventually transmitted back, the sheer mental walls she threw up after his surprise message blanking out anything he might have gleaned with his powers. Apparently she'd gotten a much better feel for him, because these walls left no leakage he could exploit for inroads to her mind like the rather sorry versions she'd made during her upset period last night on the roof. She was stationary just behind the edge of the hallway and out of sight, exactly where she'd been since she'd heard the two of them talking. Though he was certain she'd never admit it, he knew she'd been trying, for whatever reason, to eavesdrop.

"_Are you going to stand in the hallway all day, or are you going to come and check up on your friends? Starfire here will be overjoyed to see you y'know._" He made sure to keep his mental tone uncolored by any emotion lest she suspect him upset over catching her like that. He had a feeling that he'd need everything to be as neutral as possible when the storm he could sense brewing between them finally broke.

Rather than respond, she simply strode into the main room as though she'd intended to all along, and Skye was able to answer Starfire's hanging inquiry with a nod in that direction. The other woman turned around a second time and spotted Raven, then was off in a shot that echoed with her scream of delight.

"Oh Raven, it is so good to see you well!" she screeched, and Skye continued to marvel at the change restoring her biochemistry had brought about. "Please, have you heard? Terra is going to be well also, isn't that wondrous news?" Starfire flew around Raven in ecstatic circles as the darker woman stood in expressionless silence and endured the storm of emotion. To Skye's senses, it was a whirlwind of energy buffeting hopelessly against a titan of blackly neutral power, and he admired the view unabashedly. As Starfire continued to babble in an unbelievably cheery voice, Raven managed to project a claw of solid ice just by glaring at him, attempting to make him pay for daring to even observe her discomfort.

"_Yes_ Starfire, it's _terrific_ news," Raven answered, cutting through Starfire's rendition of the afternoon's activities with an icy tone that slashed her tirade to an end. "I actually saw her a little earlier. She looks much better."

"Oh you have?" Starfire was unbearably interested, almost jealous, and Skye actually felt a little bad for Raven as the ordeal wore on. "I must be sure to visit her myself. But I am being rude, what brings you to us my _dear_ friend?"

"Book," Raven muttered unpleasantly, her body language screaming out her desire to be alone, "Going to read while I wait for everyone to get up so we can discuss what our next steps should be. _Okay_?"

The last was said with such a tangible viciousness that Starfire quailed, backed off, and looked over to Skye for support. Skye had begun to pretend to examine one of the pistols again some time ago, having no interest whatsoever in becoming a player in _that_ personality conflict. Stranded without aid, Starfire made herself scarce.

"Very well, in that case I shall… I shall make use off the showering facilities myself! I am in need of a cleansing after my previous exertions… I will see you… later yes?" and she retreated in extreme haste from the fuming mystic without waiting for an answer.

That left Raven and Skye alone in the common room. Skye continued to fiddle with his gun, twirling it through expert loops that he would punctuate every so often with a swirling pitch high into the air before catching it in his other hand. Raven took a moment to settle herself after her dismissal of Starfire, then found a spot on the couch where she could read by the light of the afternoon sun pouring through the huge windows. An outside observer wouldn't have been able to miss the tension in the air between them if he or she had been wearing a blindfold, earmuffs, nose plugs, and... oh yeah, was _dead_. Strain like that couldn't last, it was merely a question of who would break first.

"Starfire was looking… energetic," Raven stated emotionlessly, and there was a choking sound and a thump of impact from Skye's side of the room. He'd been certain that she would wait him out, and the unexpected mistake left him off balance, so that it was a moment before he even recognized the stinging in his toe and cursed.

"Ouch!—Damn… yeah, I took care of her," Skye responded with an equally emotionless tone as he bent over and recovered his gun, and it sounded like two computers were talking to one another in the deathly quiet room.

"You seem to be making a habit of that. Taking care of us I mean." Raven never looked up from her book, and her tone was so meticulously expressionless that he could glean nothing of what she meant by that. It was a perfectly calculating probe, and Skye knew he was in for a game of darting inquiries.

"I know better than to squander my resources in times of strife. My talents lie in healing as much as combat, and so I implement them to the fullest whenever possible." He matched her expressionless comment with an equally oblique statement that could mean anything or nothing.

"Resources? Is that how you see us then?" …touché.

"_I_ didn't say that. _You_ said that. Is that how you _think_ I see you?" Bingo! Major score on the rebound. Raven closed her book and gave him an unreadable sidelong glace over her shoulder. After a mild sigh, she looked away again and began to talk without quite as much evasive emptiness in her tone.

"I can't honestly say that I have any clue what to think of you. There is every indication that you can be trusted, last night was certainly quite the poignant demonstration of that. However, weathering the trial by fire is only so much…" and now she became particularly grave and Skye was once again clueless of how to interpret it, "we still have a great deal to discuss, you and I."

"I've tried to make my intentions as clear as possible," Skye began with the conceited dismissal that no one had ever challenged before. "If you still have something to say, something to discuss…"

"Oh drop it!" she snapped at him, the sudden flare of anger taking the wind out of his sails like a punch in the kidneys. "Just listen to me for a minute, and them maybe you'll drop that act and really deal with me."

"The only thing you've made clear is your intention to _use_ us against your opponents. You put on a great show of being a pleasant person, stringing us along with enough half-truths and clever omissions to make the appearance of free disclosure, but I know that you're hiding so very much more than you share. That's none of my business of course—I couldn't care less what you choose to hide or share with others, you've been as open as possible on matters that could affect us, so I can't really complain. My problem is pretty close to what it's always been Skye: you're dangerous, your powers are dangerous, and that counts for both friends and foes."

"Raven—" Skye choked his protest through a whirlwind of shock, he didn't know how many more direct hits he'd be able to take, but Raven wasn't about to let him get a word in edgewise.

"_I know this_," she cut him off effortlessly, "because I know myself. My powers are the same way, and it takes constant effort to keep them from tearing everyone and everything around me into little pieces. I can barely tolerate exposing my friends to myself, so if you think I'm just going to sit by while you thoughtlessly manipulate and feed off of them, you'd better think again."

"Now just hold on—"

"_Please!_ Do you think I'm stupid? Do you think I don't notice? You have more faces than a hell changeling, you switch between them at will to get the response you need from people. You read emotions and surface thoughts like manipulation roadmaps, you drain feelings at will to pacify detractors, and you apply your compulsions and telepathic alterations shamelessly to arrange things just the way you want them."

"Come now, just let me—"

"And the only reason I tolerate _ANY_ of it, is because… when the bottom line comes… I believe you genuinely _do_ have everyone's best interests at heart." Raven trailed off, slumping forward slightly where she sat. The entire time she hadn't even bothered to turn around, and as she studied the carpeting, Skye's mind raced with surprise at what was happening. She picked up again before he could even almost come to terms with it.

"Skye, I don't like your methods, I don't like your attitude, and, in lieu of these two things, I find it very difficult to like _you_. That said… you've given me back Terra… and you've dragged Starfire and Robin from the brink of oblivion… _and_ you're instrumental to us all surviving the mess you drudged out of hiding… so I'm going to go against my instincts and give you a chance to say your part. Please, help me understand why you're such a heartless, manipulative bastard."

Her tone left no room for argument, and Skye wiped every notion he'd conceived about this woman from his mind as he prepared to deal with her fresh. She'd stopped him cold, cut him off at the knees, and knocked the wind out of him, all without ever turning around, and so he had no trouble admitting to himself that she required every bit of his ability to deal with. Girding his spine with his powers, he drew his gun and began to twirl it nervously while processing all she'd said.

"I've never _really_ tried to hide what I am," Skye began after a full two minutes of utter silence in the room, his voice dead and empty of everything, every mask he'd ever worn stripped away to create a tone she wouldn't be able to doubt. "I won't deny that I've been freely manipulating you and your friends, arranging everything so as best to combat my opponents and allow us all to survive what's coming. It's not like I was being secretive about it, so I should hardly be surprised that you've noticed. It's just that, most people I've dealt with, including your friends, tend to simply _choose_ to not see, and so this particular confrontation is something of a new thing for me. I suppose the simple heart of the matter is that I've been sewing the seeds of our survival as best as I can see, because that's just it… I _do_ 'see.'"

"I get feelings, I get hunches, I have visions of what may come and what might be, and I _act_ on them. Every action I take is guided by perceptions so acute that I don't even process them on a conscious level, I act as I feel I must when I must because that's simply how I've always worked. I've… I've never had… 'friends,' before—only allies, subordinates, and superiors since my sisters were stolen away from me and I was inducted into this empty hell of a life."

"This being the case, I hope you can understand that my every instinct is geared to operating alone, to working in a state where everyone is either an enemy or a tool for me to implement for the common survival. I've never had to go outside a paradigm of isolation, so I've become used to lining up everything around me until everything I want to protect is positioned as best as I know how. Never in the past have the feelings and cares of those who I'm working with been a major, or hell, even a minor concern, not when my chances of ever seeing or working with them again are never worth even mentioning. Heartless? What does it even _mean_ to have heart? _Really_?"

"Yes, I do wear masks. I told you once, my special disabilities leave me sadly lacking in the natural personality department, and so I practice the manufacture of various persona to compensate. If I seem to change between them erratically at times, it's just my instincts working me, pushing me to act the way I need to if I'm to get what I want. Before you start choking on that statement, I'm going to remind you that the survival of all of you is currently my major priority, believe it or not. Otherwise I just try to blend in and avoid disturbing people."

"Draining… well, I'm a PV Raven, what do you _want_? When someone's out of whack emotions get in the way of me doing what I need to do, why should I stay my hand from sucking them dry? After weighing the sanctity of emotion versus the principal upon which I always, always act, 'protecting the integrity and perpetuation of sentient consciousness,' I've come to determine that the latter is more important by far. If you think I use it too often and without consideration of what exactly I'm robbing people of, well, I'm sorry but that's a lifestyle choice I made a long time ago."

Skye finished talking abruptly, his tone never having altered or shifted once the entire time, and thus nothing indicating that he was nearly finished until he shut up. He continued to twirl his revolver periodically, catch it, then twirl it again, mixing in a spinning toss ever now and again for variety. He was empty inside, having taken a big chance in expressing himself as he had, and now he was concentrating very hard on a specific portion of the wall as he waited for how it all fell out. Unable to read Raven's reactions, he was sadly out of the loop, and living a life of constant information, this was never a situation he appreciated. Not knowing made him nervous, and thus only his powers kept his pulse from racing and his breath from baiting while he waited.

"Is that really the creed you follow?" She asked suddenly after a very pregnant pause, and Skye could have died from the jolt of adrenaline that shot through him. Quelling it all with a deep pull of his power, he made himself perfectly calm before he answered, knowing that the future was twisting and shaping based on his actions right now.

"Some years ago, after searching for an explanation as to why I had such a shitty lot in existence, I came to the conclusion that I was the victim of a vicious system of control perpetuated by uncaring extra-planar forces. As I looked around at all the other beings in the same situation, I attempted to find some grounds upon which I could feel kinship for the plethora of utterly alien beings that shared the same suffering as me. After a while, I found that the common thread among us all was the advanced state of mind known as consciousness. Consciousness, the ability to perceive the nature of time's progression, the ability to communicate ideas, the ability to form plans, to possess hopes and dreams, and all those things that separate people from animals."

"In time I came to believe that this was the ultimate sacrosanct feature that should be treasured and nurtured throughout existence, mostly because it was the thing most defaced and tramped upon by all the beings I'd grown to hate. Those that respect sentient life deserve respect and protection in turn. Those that threaten or demean, the ones that deface minds and grind independent egos into dust, they deserve to die or otherwise be removed from interaction with real people before they can plague the rest of us further than they already have. In the end, life is cheap, but consciousness and intelligent thought are the ultimate miracle of our common existence. Or at least that's the way I see it."

Skye was no longer empty then. Describing the core of his personal philosophy out loud like that had an odd effect on him, and it was all he could do to stave off the draining as he treasured the momentary sensation, grasping desperately at it as it inevitably slipped away from him. Raven was silent, then changed position for the first time since she'd given him that ambiguous glare, turning in her seat until she kneeled on the couch and looked back at him.

He could feel her gaze taking him in, the violet eyes focused until they seemed to peer into his soul… something that wasn't entirely out of the question. He felt a mild curiosity for what she'd think of his soul, which was a good thing because it meant the grip of fear brought on by the flux of reality was ending, and he was once again able to taste approaching events. He wondered if she noticed the way his body loosened as his uncertainty came to a close, wondered if she realized that he already knew she was going to give him a shot, and once again felt a sting of annoyance that he was unable to read her as he could the others.

That too faded away, and he felt himself equalized again. He'd weathered the storm, and he celebrated by sliding his gun back into his belt and walking over toward the woman now sizing him with cold eyes. Raven remained silent, her hard gaze gaining an edge as she watched his change in stance and subsequent approach. Otherwise motionless, she was following him with her full attention as he approached the furthest part of the couch from her and hopped over into an expressive lounge. She continued to study him for some time as he wallowed in complete neutrality of spirit and mind.

"Skye…" she began slowly as her gaze softened perceptibly and she turned away, hiding what almost could have been a smile. "I'm willing to give you a chance here, god knows I'll probably regret it. Just promise me a little inclusion for the rest of us from now on… we're supposed to be your friends, not 'tools to be arranged for optimization of mutual survival.' That means, before you tinker with a Titan's mind, you get permission, and enough with the manipulations. With friends… you just ask." Skye was silent in the face of this ultimatum, considering every angle of how he'd been acting so far and beginning to lay foundations for how he'd have to change if this was going to work out. After a while…

"…You know Raven… that actually sounds kind of nice," Skye answered pleasantly, if ever so slightly hesitantly, as he felt the last vestiges of doubt and stress in his soul melt away. When he really thought about it, he was so damn tired of being alone, maybe this could be his chance…

"I think… if you can promise to help keep me from succumbing to old habits… it shouldn't be a problem to… 'tweak' my methods. I've never really tried before… but then again… no one's ever asked me to before either." Skye let that hang as he began to systematically relax his muscles, sinking ever deeper into a full trance as he prepared to slip into the astral plane.

"Oh, trust me Skye. If I catch you messing around with one of my friends without permission… it'll be hard to miss my intervention." This time she did smile, and it gave Skye a weird shock of feeling even through the numbness of the trance he was falling into. He savored the fleeting sensation, gaining a smile of his own. Somewhere, quite a ways down, Skye knew they had a great deal left to discuss, but he sincerely hoped the next round wouldn't involve triple-reinforced mental shields icing away all of the extra dynamics that made speaking with another sensitive such a treat.

"I'm going to crash for a while… wake me when the others are up and around… I can give you all a full brief on Terra… then we can all grab a meal together… _all_ of us…" Skye pressed these last phrases through the deepening haze around him then slipped his mind into another plane of existence, retreating from the prime material before something else could go explosively wrong.

As he followed a randomly winding route through the ether of the astral plane, meandering without haste toward his beacon, as always intensely careful of being tailed, he went over that last, spectacular interaction once more. Raven had done something unique among all the independent conscious beings he'd dealt with since his family had disintegrated all those years ago—she'd challenged his self-imposed isolation. He was still slightly rocked from the implications slipping and sliding into place in his mind, and the new conundrum became a consuming force for his formidable intellect to process.

Never before had anyone thought to call him out of the solitude he existed in, the utterly closed world he'd backed into to protect himself from the pitfalls and shooting sticks of the sociopolitical hell that was the IDP hierarchy. Starfire and those like her, innocents that failed to see the walls he placed around himself, they often tried to make some headway, but they always spoke to the congenial facades that he constructed, and inevitably failed to comprehend what was really going on with him. Raven had sliced directly to the heart of his solitude, and he was still reeling.

People he'd dealt with in the past were always more than willing to accept the aid he granted without much more than gratitude and a willingness to grant him the autonomy to work his creeping manipulations without comment. Results were all they ever really cared about, and the ends always seemed to justify the means, so much so that people never asked him how he achieved what he did, nor ever failed to ignore the most blatantly objectionable methods he implemented if it meant not having to deal with him. He'd never know if it was that they feared he would retaliate if challenged or if they simply didn't care enough to wonder why he worked the way he did, or even if it was something he himself did to them without thinking about it, but he'd never once been invited out of the solitude he inevitably worked from by a person who knew his core personality. Until now.

He'd known for quite some time that he'd found a kindred spirit of a sort, he could sense it the way he could sense a rock, and he could analyze it the way he could analyze a soul, but he'd never considered that it could get to this point. Granted there had been hints of it last night, but he knew better than to place any faith in behavior exhibited in extreme circumstances, not considering the fact that people were inevitably at either their best or worst in such situations and never the same in everyday life. But now… if he was reading the signals right (a big if—he was familiar in reading psychic signals she denied him, and he was clueless of the more mundane signals she might be granting) he had stumbled across a woman who might actually understand the void his existence had steadily devolved into over these years. Going over some of the more confusing and unexpected things he'd found himself doing last night, he couldn't help but be extremely nervous about just how well they seemed to connect.

(Raven)

When she felt that he was completely gone again, Raven let out a suppressed tension that left her shaking slightly in the aftermath. She had had no idea how that was going to go, and the uncertainty had been killing her. For all she'd really known, he'd been hiding a monster under all those masks, a monster that would explode when called out so directly. There hadn't been one, and she'd been certain… somehow… that there wasn't one, but the possibility had kept her on a knife's edge.

However, unwilling to sit by and watch that guy act in the asinine and apparently uncaring way he'd so obnoxiously trounced about with, maneuvering people like chess pieces then covering it with a perfect façade of pleasantness, she hadn't been able to put it off any longer. It hadn't seemed _threatening_ to her, clearly he'd been more than naturally _certain_ that he was doing what was best for them all, but she wasn't going to stand for the condescension such treatment represented, even if he himself didn't realize that was part of what he was doing. At the same time… she couldn't stand to see such a powerful person reduced to the utterly lonely existence that same behavior described. It was too much like what she herself suffered through.

She'd seen him tense, and that had definitely been the effect she'd been going for, she hoped a little cardiac stress drove this lesson home and altered his behavior somewhat. If he could get those weird notions of interaction out of his system and loose the almost automatic drive to manipulate his surroundings, he might actually be a pleasant and acceptable person to be around. That he seemed perfectly willing to try, well, she couldn't decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing. The thing she _knew_ was that she really, really hoped he would, because they still had a _lot_ to talk about, and she'd regret having to reject him out of general principal.

Deep down, she actually did _want_ to talk with him again, _really_ talk with him, the way only sensitive beings can communicate. There was something in him, some incredible echo of herself that was simultaneously extremely frightening and utterly enticing, and she knew she'd never be able to forgive herself is she just shut this one out like she had all the others. As that little box of last night's troubles and terrors she'd shut away continued to itch in her mind, chaffing with the need to be dealt with, certain of the more confusing and unexpected things they'd been doing leaked out to haunt her, and she couldn't help but feel extremely nervous about how well they seemed to connect.

Preview:

Next time we'll see the dark side of being the leader of the Titans… POLITICS! Beyond that I feel an introduction to how Terra's healing process is going to be handled would be appropriate, and perhaps an initial probe into the crazy, messed up situation Skye and Raven are being caught up in could also make a show. Once again, the title eludes me as of right now, but I can't imagine it'll be too snappy anyway.


	22. PIT pt3: Connections

Intro:

Oh my god but this is a good one. I'll mention that I finally get into the ultra juicy parts of Skye's origin and that the relationship between him and Raven begins to sizzle more than Canadian bacon, so stick through the start to get at the ass kicking end.

Chapter 22 (Section 5, part 3): Connections

Robin's Room—Dusk

Robin's room was the same dark, featureless refuge it had always been. With the sparse lighting all dimmed, it was impossible even to make out the newspaper clippings on the wall or the case files and clues strewn across the expensive mahogany table that was the only stick of furniture in the main area. The large computer terminal with its window-sized flat screen terminal that dominated the right wall was running a slideshow screensaver of photographs with the Titans in various jubilant occasions they'd enjoyed over this brilliant but too-short time together, and the changing scenes brightened and darkened the room as they switched. The soft breathing of the room's only occupant whispered through the utter silence, emanating from the lavishly upholstered, high-back leather chair in front of the computer.

After Robin had ended a few too many late nights asleep in front of the master computer out in the common room, Cyborg had installed a private access terminal so he could work himself to death in the comfort of his own room. The exceptionally luxurious chair had been a gift from one of the Titans' 'corporate benefactors,' and there was a twin to it getting well-used in a bat-infested cave on the other side of the country. These days he slept in the chair as often as in his own bed, and he truly felt no worse for a night in the magnificently padded and expertly custom-fit recliner. As it was, he lay sprawled out in it quite beyond reach, the antidote to the chemical sleep inhibitors he'd been popping clutched in one hand still.

An insistent buzzing sprang up without warning, bleeping out of his computer in a toning blare acoustically optimized to pierce the deepest slumber. When combined with the harsh flashing messages springing up on the suddenly very active computer, it was only a second before Robin was jerking and thrashing in the chair, moaning in exhaustion and cursing with complete disorientation. The last thing he remembered was injecting an auto-hypo full of wake-up juice inhibitor, and the undeniable activity of his terminal might as well have been the next instant.

As he finished cursing his way to wakefulness, he noticed the caller ID up in huge letters on his massive computer screen, and started cursing for an entirely different reason as he kicked his chair out of reclining and ran his hands nervously through his hair. Catching a glimpse of himself in a reflection off of one of the many smaller sub-monitors around him, he prepared himself for the worst, twisting his face into a neutral smile despite the gurgling in his intestines these particular calls always brought on. With a sigh, he activated the connection.

"Hello Mr. Mayor."

"Ahhh, Robin, boy wonder, caped crusader, how nice of you to finally take my call." The person on the other end of the video connection was a patrician looking fellow past his prime, tall, thin, and graying, but still possessed of an undeniable vitality and a dangerously intelligent gleam in his washed out blue eyes. He wore a fine blue business suit and a deep red tie, and he was seated at a tidy desk with dozens of reports and forms spread out for his inspection. The seal of the city government was on the wall behind him in white on blue, and the whole scene granted the man an air of authority that he wore like a favored old jacket. He'd been mayor for ten years, and he'd been a powerful political figure since well, well before Robin had even been born.

"Yeah, I'm sorry about that sir, but things were breaking down here so I ordered everyone to get some sleep." Over his extensive dealings with the other man, Robin had learned a few tricks to dealing with him. One was to always appear to be in complete command in the Tower, no matter how casual his actual leadership ever became, because he was talking to a man who respected power and decisive command, not friendship. "It wouldn't do for us to be dead on our feet if something untoward should happen to the city again."

"Granted… granted…" the Mayor grudgingly agreed, the fire in his eyes from Robin's recent and fully intentional snubbing, where the boy wonder blocked the Mayor's calls while he got a minimum of sleep, fading somewhat as he was reminded of the necessity and utility of the person he was talking to. Then they flared again as his anger took front row over any restraint he might have possibly felt.

"The thing is," he began, his voice edged with heat that he was barely suppressing, "the Press has been breathing down my neck for answers I can't give them. I tell them, 'At this time, the situation is under investigation by the police and the Teen Titans, and details are forthcoming.' But you know Robin… details _aren't_ forthcoming. The police are clueless, no matter how much I yell at the Chief, and so I've been lying to the press to cover for their incompetence while I wait for my million dollar babies—you and your friends—to return my calls. So perhaps you can understand my relief to have finally gotten a hold of you again. Our last conversation wasn't exactly enlightening after all."

"Mr. Mayor… sorry. I hate to leave you in that situation, but we're still going over things here. We have facts that may well hold up into theories, but we haven't had time to prepare a statement. Besides sleep, there were injuries to take care of and—"

"Injuries? Good lord Robin, why didn't you call the paramedics again! I keep a staff of the best, most discreet doctors in the state on call at virtually any hour of the day!" The Mayor's demeanor had changed drastically, and Robin would have been touched if he'd thought for one second that it was anything but the man's towering proprietary instinct speaking. He couldn't stand the thought of loosing his investment in them, not considering what spectacular returns he'd been getting.

"Please, it was nothing like that sir. Not like before anyway, I mean no one's life was in danger. Sir, please, just give us a little more time. If you can keep the press at bay for just another few hours, I can prepare a statement. By tomorrow you can hold a press conference and we can address the public with full disclosure." The mayor gave him an imposing glare of unhappiness in response, then cocked his head to one side slightly and rubbed his temple as he began to talk.

"Robin, perhaps you don't understand the situation I'm in down here. Locked up in that fortress out in the bay, I can imagine it would be difficult to get a finger to the city's pulse, so I'm going to try to illustrate for you just what I'm facing. An office building has collapsed in the commercial district, causing numerous deaths and innumerable injuries, blocking roads and totally screwing the water and electrical service for the entire block. A four alarm fire burnt down thirteen buildings in the financial district, and the fire chief said some of the damage resulted from heat on a level he'd never even imagined possible, much less seen before, leaving stretches of warped stone that will be warm to touch for months. The Pier Park—the same park on our bestselling souvenir postcard—the same park that brings in more tourist dollars than the bay bridge—is now twenty feet under the surface of the ocean along with one of the most profitable stretches of boardwalk on the western seaboard!"

"Robin, the people are afraid to leave their homes, others are fleeing the city even as we speak! This does not reflect well on me, nor on you, and the Press will _not_ miss an opportunity to describe this in great detail _unless_ I can give them something _else_ to run. Come now, can't you give me something to feed them? Any change at all will shut them up until your statement later, but I can't wait any longer if I want to salvage the next election. Need I remind you that my opponent Roy Donners has been mouthing off to interested ears about his plan to eliminate the Titans budget and spend half the difference on extra police? Neither of us wants him taking my place…"

As the Mayor went on, Robin began to get a terrible headache. Despite the sleep he'd gotten, which surprisingly had been more than enough to clear his mind, politics always managed to mess with his system. He didn't know how the old man could stand the press, which Robin allowed onto Titan's Island only with great reluctance (it helped keep paparazzi out among other things), and if he'd made the plead on any other premise Robin would have just left him to deal with it. As it was…

"Okay, I guess I didn't realize haw bad things had gotten out there with all the stuff going on here. This is what I can tell you now with complete faith that the press _won't_ be able to disprove it and we _won't_ end up contradicting ourselves: Last night was a battle between two powerful criminal organizations that, until now, had been dueling silently for supremacy over the city. The first organization is well known, the second was so secretive in its infiltration of the city that it only recently came to our attention. Since it's already probably all over the streets, you can go ahead and confirm that the first is a resurgence of Slade's syndicate lead by the masked man himself."

"_JESUS_! _Slade_?" the Mayor nearly stood up in his shock, his wrinkled hand rising to hold his balding forehead as he came to terms with the news. "That _psychopath_ is still alive? For _god's_ sake Robin, I didn't even know that yet, and you're telling me it's probably on the _streets_? The press is going to have a field day with that. I can see it now 'Reports of Slade's death greatly exaggerated by overconfident crime fighters.' It's going to be a _nightmare_ toning it down…"

"_Trust me_, it came as a shock to me too. I have _no idea_ how he got out of that volcano alive, but he _won't_ get away from me the next time around. Anyway… the second group is brand new, exceptionally vicious, and perhaps more dangerous than Slade ever was. We really have no clue where they came from, but they don't seem to have any compunction whatsoever about using flagrant deadly force to get what they want. I don't know if you want to confirm this to the press just yet, but the attack of two days past was definitely their way of saying hello, and a _very_ nearly successful assassination attempt on _us_."

"My god…" the mayor thought once more about the massive property damage that had been caused, and then considered that it had been an attempt to eliminate the only obstacle standing between them and a group capable of such an attack. He shook his head in disgust at the thought of that fool Donners and his shortsighted number crunching, wondering what in god's name had saved the city from crumbling under the weight of these weird, extreme crises before he'd personally spearheaded the operation to attract their own group of supers.

"Robin, thanks. That'll be more than enough to sic the Press on for now, but I'm just going to warn you that they're going to be rabid with questions by tomorrow, so you'd better be ready. The rumor mill has been cranking out whispers of a new Titan, of ghosts frightening people away from Green Construction before it collapsed, and all kinds of other crazy nonsense. If it was any other city I'd just put it down to hysterics, but around here… well… I'll let you go now. Get me a full statement in time for the eleven o'clock news, and please give the medics a call if they're needed. This sounds like it's far from over."

The mayor hung up the line and his image was replaced with Robin's desktop and wallpaper, a plain black letter R with gold outlines on a red background. Robin leaned way back into his comfortable chair and sighed deeply, lamenting over the amount he'd had to guess and assume to keep his boss happy. The guy really wasn't so bad, but the forces he had to appease were so often at odds with anything Robin cared to spend time on that the friction just drove him nuts. For now, the Press was keeping him from asking uncomfortable questions about why there was a new mesa smack in the middle of the commercial district, and that was more than enough for Robin to feed him whatever he needed to stave off the media dogs. In any case, it was time to get everyone together for a talk.

Titan's Tower Residential Floor Hallways

Beast Boy was wandering aimlessly toward the common room, sleep burdened eyes matching his slack jaw and stooping gait. He'd awoken from a dreamless sleep to the sound of the rumbling in his own stomach, and the pleasant fuzz of exhaustion was currently insulating his mind from any and all concerns in this world. With one hand against the wall to support himself, he took one stumbling step after another, propelling himself with difficulty toward the most likely source of food in the building. With uncomprending eyes, he took a moment from his slow progression to pause and watch a striking blond walk slowly by. He then faced forward again and began to progress toward the common room once more.

Somewhere in the vast empty space currently populating his head, two electrical impulses circled and swirled like teasing lovers, never quite touching as they flickered and leapt through a complicated pattern of mutual attraction. Eventually the relationship overcame the impediment of the space between them, and a thought was born in his mind with the force of a dying star. His whole body went stiff as the thought shot through him like an electrical shock, and there was a resounding thump as he smacked face first into the floor, dropping like a tipped cow. It was several seconds of his bulging eyes pressing into the tiling before the shock wore off enough for him to move.

"TERRA!" he observed quite loudly, his chin pressing uncomfortably into the floor. In an instant he was in dog form, up and dashing back toward the woman that had passed him before. The skittering of claws against tile announced his complete failure to make any progress, the only place his bounding leaps were taking him was off balance, as evidenced by the stinging smack his face took against the floor, dog form crumbling back to human with the impact.

"TERRA!" he made his battle cry heard once more, looking up at the blond haired woman walking slowly away, oblivious to his shouting. This time he was a darting reptile, the lizard's clinging toes launching him across the floor like a living arrow and overtaking her in an instant. Shifting back to full size human form at full blast, he skidded by her before he could even get a glimpse, his momentum carrying him backward into an open broom closet at the turn in the hall with a clattering of buckets and mops. Leaning his head forward off the floor, he could just see the woman making her way around the corner and out of sight from under the bucket's rim. Pulling himself out from under the pile of cleaning supplies, he attempted to leap to his feet only to catch a soapy spot underfoot and fling again too the floor. Clang! His bucket-coated skull smacked into the ground a third time and stunned him momentarily.

"TERRA!" this time his shout was muffled by the bucket, but the fevered urgency was no less palpable for the metallic ring of the still-vibrating water basin over his skull. A hummingbird took off from the closet, rounded the corner, overtook the woman, then transformed into a young man with arms outstretched to halt the woman's progress. Beast Boy's wide, staring eyes attempted to comprehend what he was looking at as he stood in silence before her, smarting badly from the lumps on his head.

She was wet, as though she'd just gotten out of the shower, her long hair hanging limp and damp down her shoulders and covering her face partially. As his eyes drank her in, she pushed the hair out off her face in an age-old gesture that made his heart race, the golden drapery settling around the fluffy white bathrobe she sported. His pulse pounding like a raging primal beast caged in his chest, he struggled for breath as the enormity of what he was seeing shattered his mind. He gurgled out several attempts at talking as she continued to stand calmly before his obstructive presence.

The scene stretched out, Terra continuing to stand in silence and Beast Boy continuing to gurgle inarticulately in a complete failure to say all the millions of things he wanted to say as he stood frozen in an obstructive posture in the middle of his own home. Nothing at all changed, in fact, until Beast Boy's wandering stupefied gaze finally found Terra's eyes, and found them to be empty. His heart almost stopped as the past days came back to him in a flash of comprehension that left him on his knees gasping for air, and the moment he was no longer blocking the hallway she stepped around him to continue her progress to her unknown destination. As she moved away, something inside of him panicked and he reflexively reached out to grasp her wrist, to keep her from leaving him again. It was a mistake.

The next thing he new he was chewing wall, his whole body numb from the high speed impact he'd been flung through. A stinging grip twisted his arm up and behind his back, pinning him effortlessly against the plaster he was already smashed against. He would have screamed in pain if there had been any air left in his lungs after the impact, but even this became a null point as another hand gripped the back of his head and cracked his skull against the wall a second time. The fourth lump was a charm, and he sank woozily to the floor as the world faded from his eyes. The last thing he saw was Terra's slim form striding calmly into a room that hadn't gotten much traffic for weeks now. Hers.

Titans Tower Common Room

"Raven, come quickly!" came Starfire's frightened voice from down the hall, and Raven snapped her book shut and flashed to her feet as she turned toward the call. In a whiff of black energy, she was emerging from the wall behind Starfire and looking down at the prone form of Beast Boy sprawled on the hallway floor. The fair young woman was supporting his head as his unfocused eyes wandered around and he mumbled incoherently. In a glace Raven was able to tell that he was merely dazed, and the quickening of her heart calmed as she instead wondered what in the hell had happened to him.

"Beast Boy, what is the matter friend? Who has attacked you?" Starfire voiced queries so Raven didn't have to, and she turned from the rather futile attempt to exact something understandable from the green one and began to examine the scene. Her every sense was on a razor's edge, primed to detect whatever had accosted him, her temper heating at the thought of someone loose in their home. After all the crap they'd weathered last night, for someone to be sneaking around… they'd just better hope she wasn't the one to catch them.

"Raven, who could have done this?" asked Starfire, a mixture of anger and fear in her voice as she gently lifted Beast Boy's dead weight from the floor and supported him on her shoulder, his arm wrapped around her neck. He'd moved from mumbling to moaning in pain, but was still completely unresponsive.

"I really couldn't say Starfire," Raven answered, allowing utter emptiness to posses her lest her anger begin to disassemble the building around them, "But I know just how to find out. Stick close to me and keep an eye on Beast Boy." With that she flipped out her communicator and keyed up Cyborg.

Rather than a response, Raven was granted ring after ring, and her pulse exploded again as she realized she had no idea where he was or if he needed help too. She hadn't heard from him since she'd sent him away from her room this morning, and the fear was almost painful as her mind raced with all the things that could have happened to him. Without giving it a second thought, she overrode the ringer and opened the line directly, breath quickening in anticipation. The screen showed a visual of a room with dimmed lights, revealing nothing, and the view kept moving, which meant the camera in Cyborg's wristcom was moving.

"_Cyborg_? Cyborg are you there?" her voice was even, but it held an edge of panic that even got Starfire's attention, and the other woman shifted her attention from trying to keep Beast Boy's limp weight upright to what Raven was doing, allowing the green one to hang almost comically from her shoulder in a boneless sprawl as he continued to moan his agony to the world. There was at first no response, and Raven found herself holding her breath as the image continued to move.

"Cyborg, damn you, pick up the line before I have to come down there!" she gambled, placing her hopes on the line as what she fervently wished to be true was placed up for examination. Of course, there was a reason she always won every bet against the others. The picture pitched through a wide arc before coming to rest on the haggard, run-down face of their cybernetic ally.

"Raven, what the hell is so damn important that you hafta scream at me? I'm mindin' my own business down here in the workshop, which I kinda hoped would send a message to everyone else up there." Raven's fury at his nastiness in the face of her epic concern was counterbalanced by the flush of relief at the fact that he was fine, leaving her just about even enough to respond to his crappy attitude in kind.

"Just shove it Cy, this is business. Star and I found Beast Boy semiconscious in the residence hallway with signs of a struggle." Signs of a struggle—heh—the multiple impressions in the wall, scratched tiling, and the mess made out of the supply closet made it look like a herd of wild animals had had free reign… witch would be consistent with Beast Boy in a struggle to be sure. "Run back the security tapes and give me good news."

"Shit, B.B.'s hurt? _God damn it_, someone picked the _wrong_ afternoon to screw with my friends!" Cyborg's threats were comforting if only because it indicated to Raven that his heart was in the right place, even if he had found reason to mope in his workshop with the lights dimmed. "I'm running back the tapes now—I mean _damn_, I look away for _freeking_ two hours and somebody jumps B.B.! Hold on, residence halls… okay… uh… WHAT?" That caught her off guard, and Raven was consumed by curiosity at the particularly ripe tone of exceptional shock in his tone. Starfire was too, and Raven tried not to roll her eyes _too_ much as she held the com unit up so the other woman wouldn't have to lean so closely over her shoulder.

"I don't—how did—she was just—" Cy began to sputter, "I mean _how_ in the _hell_… and _why_ would she… if Skye… but…" he continued to say a great deal without actually revealing anything, and Raven wasn't about to stand for it anymore.

"Out with it! What the hell happened?" she snapped so fiercely that Starfire squeaked and moved away from her reflexively as a cloud of fierce black energy kicked up around her. Raven might have regretted it if she wasn't so tunnel visioned on the way Cyborg's panic-stricken visage mutated into a mask of fantastic excitement. In a moment he was beaming with almost divine ecstasy, and Raven would have killed to know what he was thinking. "Cyborg, I'm not kidding, what the _hell_ is going on!"

"Raven… just… look in Terra's room. That's where she disappeared to… you'll understand then. I'll be up in a minute." He cut the connection and left Raven with an afterimage of his utterly brilliant smile and little more in the way of answers than she'd had before she called. Storming with the black energy of her frustration in a crackling halo around her body, she stalked the dozen or so steps over to the forgotten corner where Terra's room stood, leaving Starfire behind in an almost traumatized daze from the force of her ire.

Hardly possessing enough patience at this point to keep from blind-jumping into the space, Raven walked through the wall like it wasn't there, arriving in the area Beast Boy had been preserving so lovingly and so futilely over the woman's long absence. Everything was exactly as it should be, and Raven was seconds away from teleporting to Cyborg's workshop and giving that metal bastard a piece of her mind, when instead she caught sight of movement over by the wardrobe. She blinked in surprise as her anger dissipated, so completely did the unexpected sight displace everything from her mind.

With a few numb steps to one side, she got a good look at what was behind the wardrobe's open door, and her jaw almost fell off her face. For three full seconds of utter and enduring, mind-numbing surprise, she stared at Terra. The other woman was halfway dressed and still dripping wet from her shower, the deathly pale skin and pronounced ribs disappearing behind the loose shirt she pulled over her nakedness as Raven watched slack-jawed. Little starbursts of black energy began to crackle and pop off of Raven's body in minute explosions that spread a spectrum of black, purple, and deep blue auroras around the room.

Terra was halfway through pulling the rest of her cloths on when Raven's mind hit the reset button and clicked into activity again, and she snapped backward out of the room, passing through the door again, then jerking to a stop in the hallway where Starfire looked on timidly, confused and clearly afraid she was going to explode again. Raven's mind kept getting to the part where Terra was up and around on her own, then would skip badly and wind up at the start again, repeating over and over as she stared at nothing, causing Starfire no end of concern and motivating the frightened young warrior over to Terra's door. It was about when she started to open it that Raven's mind finally completed the thought with—

"SKYE!" she shouted, turned on her heel to stare in the direction of the common room, then was standing next to the couch in a whooshing swirl of black energy. He was still lounging on the couch, apparently oblivious to his surroundings with his mind vagrantly traversing an alternate phase of reality. Not about to stand for this, Raven wound up to smack some life into him, thought better of what that could do to her hand, then pressed some power into the cushions below him and ejected him from his seat. Halfway through his high arc, his mind exploded to life and he finished the trip with a flip and two twists that landed him on his feet facing Raven with his guns out and a vicious tension in his frame. She glared at him until he was sufficiently aware of his surroundings to drop the guns and look puzzled, then went off without mercy.

"What did you do _this_ time?" she opened strong, expressing her frustration at his constant medaling with a single phrase of concentrated viciousness. Skye had the decency to at least pretend to quail in the face of her unexplained accusation, no matter the curious neutrality she could tell he felt.

"I don't even know what you're talking about yet Raven. What is it now? I'm certain I can explain." The concentrated shock she'd been unloading as nastiness at him couldn't help but disintegrate in the face of his calm, mostly because she knew if he wasn't concerned already then nothing was actually wrong. Left high and dry then, her next words were a great deal more subdued.

"Uh…" she'd stalled somewhat, but picked up much more calmly with, "It's Terra Skye. What did you do to her? She's up and around, she took a shower, she's getting dressed in her room right now. How the _hell_ did you manage _that_?" Having articulated her confusion accurately, finally separating it from the pressure of her shock, she was once again surprised, this time by the change in Skye's expression. He placed a hand to the side of his head in concentration, then brightened considerably in a strange mimicry of the excitement that had overcome Cyborg.

"Holy Hell! You're right! I… I don't fucking believe it!" He was shaking his head in wonder and Raven was able to pick up weird fluctuations of emotions from behind his casual shields, the peaking and dipping unlike anything she'd seen before. "I can't believe it! Two hours ago her ego-motivational processing area was so shot I'd have sworn it would take a month to get her moving under her own volition, and now… she's grooming! This is incredible. This is… it's _epic_! It shouldn't even be possible… oh lord, wait… not unless—"

Suddenly Skye broke off and glanced distractedly away, calming down to emptiness in an instantaneous flash, dumping all emotion in a wave of cold that blew over Raven's senses like an icy draft. There was a piercing scream from out of the hallway leading to their rooms, and before she could even process the sound, he was already gone, dashing into the hallways and over toward Terra's room. Acting on impulse, she leapt through space, snatched him from reality in a sweeping black cloak, then dumped them both in Terra's room the next instant. He took the unexpected translocation in stride, turning and snapping out "Terra, stop," in an utterly calm, clipped tone.

He'd managed to say it before Raven had even finished materializing them into the prime material again, and so it was a moment after she heard the words that she saw what he'd put a stop to. Terra was standing in a taught, perfectly balanced martial arts stance that Raven recognized as Slade's own. Her oversized white shirt with its huge superman insignia bellowed around her body so loosely that one could barely see the outline of her body or even the tight black shorts she'd donned, but the threat in her stance was not masked in the slightest. Starfire hovered back next to the door, eyes aglow and with blazing haloes of green fire around her fists as she kept up an expert defensive stance, the conflict here rather clear. This scene was imprinted into Raven's mind for the instant it lasted before Skye's words took effect.

Immediately Terra loosened up, the look of empty ferocity on her face replaced by an abstract calm as she took up a casual stance. Starfire had a hard time catching up, but a few seconds after Terra stopped threatening, she too let her guard down, looking back and forth in confusion between Terra and those who'd just blinked into the room. She took to absently rubbing the back of her head, and a curious glance around by Raven showed a tumble of chairs and a small table that had been knocked down in the conflict before they'd arrived. It didn't take psychic powers to know the gist of what had happened, but after running through her myriad of options, Raven decided listening might be the best course of action to fill in the gaps here.

"Um, friend Skye, would you…" and there was a terrible tremor in her voice, "happen to have knowledge of why Terra struck out at me? And perhaps… perhaps too why she has now stopped? If it was part of her condition, I am truly sorry, I merely meant to greet her when I saw that she was functioning again and… well… she would not turn around… and so I touched her shoulder…" Starfire trailed off, her confusion deepening into embarrassment and shock as she looked around at the mess the room had been left in the wake of the conflict and realized that one of her most beloved friends had just tried to throw her through a wall. Skye picked up the ball smoothly, sliding into that confident and assuring persona, one of many Raven had seen him don.

"No, Stafire, I should be the one apologizing," he said with a reassuring force that Raven could feel, even armed as she was with knowledge that he was faking what he showed now. "It was inexcusably remiss on my part to have failed to warn you all that something like this could happen. I'm sure you were quite overjoyed to see Terra up and about, but you need to understand that I've only completed the first phase of her healing process."

"What do you say to me?" Starfire began to loose her grip on English as she correctly interpreted Skye's news as exceptionally distressing, "Terra is fine. You've healed her and she now walks with us again! Surely she attacked me out of some kind of confusion?" The desperation in Starfire's voice, the deep desire to know that the pain of Terra's loss could finally be lifted again, was completely apparent to Raven, and even mimicked in the darker woman's own subdued way. The flash of unbroken hope and joy that had nearly ripped her apart when she'd first seen Terra moving and up again was still fresh in her mind, and she listened for Skye to elaborate on what the catch was.

"I'm afraid I just can't tell you what you want to hear," Skye admitted calmly, as he caught the indifferent blond woman's attention with a wave of his hand and directed her to sit on her bed. Terra obeyed without word, and Raven began to get a creeping, frightening inkling of what was going on. "You see, her mind was quite seriously eradicated by the forces that stole her away. I've… how should I say… created temporary replacement parts for pieces of her consciousness that were destroyed. It gives her the ability to walk around and appear quite healthy, because in essence, she _is_. However, deep within her mind, in the places that make her the person you know, the friend you all love so dearly, she's still badly broken and in need of much restorative effort."

"So… she is not healed?" and the crushing disappointment in Starfire was unbearable, so perfectly mimicked by the hidden heartbreak Raven experienced. Raven lashed her powers down fiercely to keep it from bursting forth, but the anguish was quite real, and she couldn't be sure if she'd successfully hidden it from Skye. "Terra!" Starfire shouted with tears in her eyes, and Raven's attention went instantly back to her as she zipped through the air to intercept the blond woman in a desperate embrace. Raven had just enough time to notice the flash of panic through her casual link to Skye before everything happened at once.

"Starfire wait!" she heard Skye snap, but Terra was already done with an expert roll off of her bed, coming into a rising snap kick aimed at a completely surprised red head who'd been flying at a stationary target the last she'd noticed. Terra's foot seemed to come at Starfire's stomach in slow motion as she rose off the floor, and Raven's mind raced futily for something she could do, so utterly had this taken her off guard. The person who _had_ anticipated it was already in motion, however, and a strong hand caught Terra's foot and twisted it expertly to dissipate the force, flipping her over and away from Starfire. In a flash, Skye was on a knee next to a suddenly prone and motionless Terra, one hand pressed against her forehead. Raven could feel his power pulsing into Terra's skull as she stood in semi-stunned silence, she and Starfire looking on in silence as he worked at whatever his mysterious purpose might be. After a moment, and without pausing in his work, he began to explain.

"I'm sorry about that, I didn't have a chance to warn you of that either. For her own safety, I gave her the ability to defend herself with all of her fighting ability, that being the only thing left in her head that was still hooked up and functioning. Because I didn't expect her initial recovery so soon, I didn't finish imprinting all of you as friendly. She attacked Beast Boy, she attacked you Starfire, and she attacked just a moment ago, all because she was threatened. I'm not exactly sure what's given her such an ingrained aversion to being touched (Raven's mind prickled with an odd sensation, and she knew this last statement was a bald-faced lie), but trying it for the time being is not suggested if a person would want to keep all of his or her teeth and various other bones intact."

"Okay," and he stopped pressing power into Terra's mind, "I've finished designating you all as friends, so she won't try to jump _you_ anymore. As to touching her, you _can_, but I'm telling you, on a level that goes deeper than active desires and thoughts, on a level basically engraved into the foundations of what's left of her _soul_, she _doesn't_ _want_ to be touched by _anyone_ ever again. Just as a heads up." Without explaining one whit further, and ignoring the myriad of unspoken questions and doubts on Starfire's face, he stepped around the various broken and tumbled furniture in the room and found Beast Boy lying forgotten in a corner. The green one stared into space vacantly, having even given up on moaning for the time being, and he was completely unresponsive as Skye waved and snapped his fingers in front of his face.

"Mild concussion," Skye commented, as though he were describing a piece of fruit and not a person. Without the slightest bit of concern on his face, he reached behind his back under his over shirt and brought his left hand back around wearing one of those gauntlets. In a second his hand was covered in blossoming silver ribbons, and the next moment he had his hand pressed against Beast Boy's forehead. Starfire stood in silence, seeming to look into herself, occasionally glancing at where Terra still lay passively on the floor. Raven was torn between so many desires that she didn't trust herself to move, and waited quietly for a chance to speak with Skye privately. For _this_ conversation, merely restricting it to telepathy wouldn't be private enough.

"Oohhh my head…" Beast Boy uttered the cliché on cue as Skye finished up and stood away from him, and the changeling sat up slowly as he tried to get his bearings. He took a long look around the room and nearly collapsed again when he saw Terra prone in the other corner. After the initial shock he was up and running toward her before anyone could say a single thing in explanation.

"NO!" Raven and Starfire shouted simultaneously, and they grappled with him, each grabbing an arm as he tried to get over to the spot next to her bed where she lay passively. Despite the fact that they had him outnumbered and supremely outmuscled in the form of Starfire's iron grip, it was still a huge struggle to keep him back, and the only sound in the room were their grunts of effort as they worked at it. Raven, finally getting fed up, gripped at him with her powers and bound him up in a coating of black force, holding him in place like a statue as the two women stood back and caught their breath. Beast Boy continued to struggle uselessly in place for some time, ignoring everything but the woman on the ground.

"Beast Boy!" Starfire shouted, laying a ringing smack across his jaw so forcefully that fully half his face began to glow a heated pink right away, finally getting his attention. He looked at the two women as though seeing them for the first time, then began a broken rant without further pause.

"Starfire, Raven, did you—did you see? Terra… Terra is back! She's better, she's—I saw her walking around in the halls! I don't know why she's lying down right now, but—I saw her walking around again in the halls! Heh, heheheh, I—I've always hoped—but I never—she was walking around in our halls, under our roof again!" The happiness in his eyes was almost manic, and neither woman was able to meet his gaze, each looking away in turn as he tried to exact matching happy glares from them. Because he seemed to have calmed down, Raven released her grip, and he stumbled as he took his weight back onto his own feet.

"Beast Boy, there is something of which we must inform you…" Starfire began to beat around the bush, but the green one was already tuning her out, focused totally on Terra as she stared at the ceiling, apparently fully lucid but still oh so empty behind her blue eyes.

"Oh Terra," he began, and at the sound of her name as a direct address, she automatically sat up from the floor to look at who was talking to her. Beast Boy was so struck by the pure physical _sight_ of her moving on her own that he ignored all the signs of her mind's vacancy, just as Starfire and Raven had at first. "I thought—eheh… I thought I'd never get another chance to talk with you. Please, I just—I just need to see that it's really you, after all this time," and he reached out toward her. Lost in the emotional quagmire coating his soul and still not fully free of the murk of his recent concussion, he didn't notice the revulsion that came over her, and the base, mindless emotion written across her face passed through him without imprinting at all.

As he reached out more quickly, he managed to brush her shoulder slightly, and she flinched away as though struck, hissing like an angry cobra and doing a spinning flip off of the floor to escape, backing away behind Raven in a flurry of quick steps then eyeing Beast Boy dangerously, never once gaining more than the most infinitesimal gleam of real intelligence in her sapphire twins.

Beast Boy sat in place, never moving from the position he'd held when she'd flinched away from him like a frightening stranger, the altercation from the hallway coming back to mind to strike him like a baseball bat to the spine. Raven could feel his emotions crumbling with his hopes and desires, the whole mess disintegrating into a mire of misery that it had only just begun to rise from in the first place. A few slow tears dripped down his face as he knelt, wallowing in his pain silently.

"What's wrong with her?" he asked quietly without moving. Starfire knelt down next to him and placed a hand on his shoulder, forcing him to give up some of the weight of his misery through direct contact.

"I attempted to inform you…" she began, drawing his gaze away form the floor and up to her face, trying to pull him up out of the bog of pain he'd thrust himself into.

"She's not done yet," Raven cut in, and Beast Boy, startled, turned to look up at her instead. She had her arms crossed and was staring into a vacant corner of the room, but continued with, "Skye has only finished the first stage of healing her mind. If we want her back, mind and body, we'll just have to be a little more patient." She spoke as though his misery were a child's petulance, maintaining a cool tone with the slightest edge of annoyance, as though his complaints put her in a huff. It worked beautifully, and he stood up quickly, incredibly angry at how she was treating him and completely oblivious to the evaporation of his sadness.

He screamed at her for a while, and when she'd felt she'd given him enough time to vent, she turned upon him the icy glare she'd been building steadily as she looked into the corner. He shut up immediately under that look, stopping mid yell with his mouth wide open as he quailed, but then immediately shifted his anger to the next most visible target. He leveled his own nasty stare at Skye as he crossed the room to be near him.

The other man seemed distant, leaning against the wall as he fingered the texture of his left gauntlet with his bare right hand, eyes masked by ever-present sunglasses. Beast Boy approached, heat fresh in his body, a glorious replacement for his misery, but with every step closer to the other man felt that heat leave. By the time he was actually next to Skye, looking up at his blank, distant expression, he didn't have a single drop of anger left, and he also felt quite cold, as though a draft was piercing his body down to the bones. His shouts and threats died a lonely, frozen death in his throat, and he sighed deeply before looking away from Skye. "Just tell me… tell me you really can fix her."

"Hmm?" Skye perked up, as though he hadn't noticed Beast Boy's presence until then. Before he said a single word, Raven noticed a change in him, and when he spoke it was with that quirky, intellectual/amicable fellow persona, and also an almost bubbling exuberance. "Yes, yes I'm quite confident of her recovery. This—right here—this is already an advancement on the timetables I predicted. The new type of regenerative matrix I planted in her mind is working incredibly well—I honestly can't say I really believe just _how_ well myself. It's truly remarkable, a _breakthrough_ no less. If I can reproduce results like this in other subjects—why, I've got the Pan-Galactic Award for Medical Achievement sewn up! Honestly, I've been working on this particular technique for a while now—y'know, tweaking it with each consecutive patient—but the one I used this time was quite a departure, and I must say I'm _exceptionally_ pleased with the results."

"_Hold it!_" this time Beast Boy was _not_ stopped by the chill of the air around Skye, launching full into to his haranguing with, "are you telling me you used an _untested_, _unapproved_ technique, one invented by _you_, a _teenager_, to heal the _delicate_, _irreplaceable_ mind of my friend?" Beast Boy's eyes were bulging now, his mind boggling at the very thought.

"Yeah," Skye spoke in the same tone he had before, as though Beast Boy hadn't said anything, "I've been burning my own trail in the field of mind healing for some time now, working at the cutting edge out where others fear to tread and whatnot, you know, the only interesting place to be. I'm telling you, that medical achievement award is _in the bag_ this time!" Skye was apparently oblivious to Beast Boy's horror, and Raven was torn between her amusement at the farce Skye was acting out and her own horror at the incredible risks Skye was nonchalantly engaging Terra in. Of course, one couldn't argue with results, a fact that both she and Beast Boy were forced to admit as Skye continued.

"Trust me guys, I really do know what I'm doing. If you need proof, simply see that your friend, who had null brain activity a few hours ago, is now acting on basic negative-feedback driven personal volition. Not much of an improvement, but it's happened about twenty times faster than anyone else has ever managed it in recorded history. The fact is that, for… very good reasons… (Raven could _taste_ the epic concealment here) I've devoted my life to mind healing. I'm quite the expert in my field—but considering how pathetic and unorganized it was before the push to make it a science really took off a few years ago, that isn't saying a whole lot."

"At a certain point, every really talented mind healer, myself included, begins to develop their own original techniques so the less talented can use the examples to learn for themselves, therein ensuring an ever greater source of soldiers against the universe's mental maladies. This technique is my own creation, and it may yet make me rich and famous, though that would be secondary to the lives saved from madness and brain death. Relax, be patient, and I can basically assure you that I'll use every resource in my arsenal to bring your friend back from beyond oblivion." Skye smiled now, and Raven knew that this was real, really real, and she felt the cold in the room lift somewhat with that smile. She didn't know about Beast Boy, but her fears were settled right there, if not any of her deeper questions and curiosities.

"Ugg," Beast Boy sighed deeply, shook his head in resignation, then looked over at where Terra stood, noticing the fact that she'd completely forgotten about him and was once more staring obliviously at her surroundings. "Hurry, please, but more than that, do your best. I want the woman I knew to come back home." With that, Beast Boy turned and began to leave the room. All eyes followed him, but became distracted quite completely when Cyborg burst suddenly through the door.

"Terra! Hey baby, come give your buddy Cy some sugar. I've been _dying_ to see you again!" He rushed across the room, and everyone stiffed and jerked into action at the same instant.

"NO!"

Teen Titans Common Room, a while later

Everyone was gathered, washed, and rested, pretty well for the first time since Skye had brought them together to begin explaining his origin and objectives. Robin and Starfire sat curiously close together at one end of the huge curving couch, drawing discreet knowing looks from Raven and curious ones from Cyborg and Beast Boy. Raven was on the edge of the couch nearest them, keeping to herself as usual. Beast Boy and Cyborg were fighting for elbow room in the middle, their antics a reassuring message that things were regaining a sense of normalcy after all the crap the past few days had thrown at them. Skye occupied the other edge of the couch, brooding silently and expressionlessly about something behind those dark glasses, maintaining an icy posture as physically far from the others as he could possibly manage without leaving the couch. Terra sat cross-legged on the floor nearby, snacking blankly on a small amount of leftover something or other Skye had pulled from the fridge for her. Start small he'd said, to get the body used to solid foods again.

The sun had set a little while ago, and the quiet hum of conversation between Starfire and Robin competed with Cyborg and Beast Boy's play-fighting as the only source of sound in the entire room. It had only taken a little while for everyone to gather after Robin had called them into one place to review their actions. After they'd met, they'd gotten to talking, and it turned out that Starfire and Robin had a great deal of heated whispering to do, and so the time had worn on, not a single one of them regretting the calm, subdued, completely normal atmosphere after the nightmarish horrors of nights past. Eventually, however, it had to end, the spell had to be broken, and Robin was the one to do it.

"Well guys," he began simply, "it's been a crazy couple of days."

"Understatement!" snapped Beast Boy, and there was general agreement from the other Titans, a rarity for his comments.

"Okay, so it's been a series of ever worsening _nightmares_," Robin amended himself, his tone sharpening in amusement, overjoyed that Beast Boy was already back to joking after the young man's very personal trials. "But we got through it, we're all here together again… all of us." At this reference, all of the Titans glanced at Terra where she sat in silence but for her gastronomical actions, and there was a general lightening of the spirits for all of them.

"Unfortunately, we won't get much of a chance to rest," Robin broke the bad news next, and the others were just happy enough about Terra to avoid a general groan at what they new was coming.

"_Debriefing Time_," everyone said at the same moment as Robin, most of them mocking his voice, an easy feat considering the fact that he said the phrase exactly the same way every time.

"Yeah right," Robin chuckled happily at the almost jovial atmosphere the room had taken on, basking in the feeling of togetherness before continuing. "We're each going to report what happened last night in turn, and afterward we're going to try and figure out what the hell we're supposed to do next. I've already ordered the pizza, and it should get here around the time the brainstorming begins. You wouldn't _believe_ how hard it is to get delivery service with the city in the state it is right now. Anyway, I'll go first."

Robin detailed his actions from the moment they'd split up on the road to the moment he'd gotten out of the squad car back at the Tower. Of course, he left out all the juicy personal moments he and Starfire had shared, and she ended up following this lead when she confirmed his tale next. The others expressed their concerns about the somewhat ridiculous powers of the aliens Slade had dredged up, and all congratulated Starfire for her spectacular stand against the pyrokinetic. All except Skye, who, as he had all along, remained mysteriously silent.

Next up were Cyborg and Beast Boy, who had quite a bit more dramatic flare in their tale. Getting off the couch and retreating to the big open area behind it, they implemented full pantomime in rendering their adventure to the others, not skimping on the sound effects and extravagant exaggerations. Particularly good was their retelling of the spectacular, skin-of-their-teeth escape they'd pulled off, the epic slide for the ocean access portal done so realistically that they managed to dump quite a bit of furniture over before they were done. There was laughter and general excitement from the others, but Skye remained as silent as the voracious Terra, quieter without the sound of her munching.

Finally, because she'd noticed Skye's silence all along and didn't care to hear what he felt was relevant enough to relate to the others, Raven rendered her tale, simultaneously the longest and most ambiguous of all. She described being with Skye when he felt the imminent violence of the night creeping up on them, but failed to mention why they were up and together after midnight. She described the altercation with Slade, the discovery of Terra, and her injury and subsequent rescue by Skye, but mentioned only that he was injured in the process of rescuing her, omitting a great deal of violence. She detailed in depth the harrowing near thing with the assassin robots at the disaster site, but skipped completely over their time on the astral plane. Finally, she told them of Skye's last-ditch strike to rescue Terra, but was more than a little vague when it came to her weird transformation into a white avatar. The others were riveted none the less, and there was a great deal of excited questioning and commentary when she finally finished with their arrival at the Tower.

"Okay, okay guys, lets just take it down a notch now," Robin tried to get some order in the room, but just then Cyborg perked up considerably, informing the rest of them that the pizza guy had just arrived. He left to get their stuff from downstairs (way downstairs, the pizza guy accessed through the underground parking lot), and Beast Boy and Starfire went back to chattering and commenting excitedly about all that had transpired so far, impressing Robin with the futility of gaining order and inducing him to join in for the time being. Raven, Skye, and Terra were all completely silent. Skye had never stopped being completely silent the entire time.

Cyborg got back with a stack of pizza boxes a little while later, the top one open and its contents already half gone. Very soon, almost all the pizza was gone, all discussion slowing considerably as food became a major application of mouths for a while. Raven had her usual few slices, Starfire ate two entire larges with extra salt, mustard, and hot sauce, Cyborg had more than his fair share (considering how small his actual food needs were with so few organic body parts), and Beast Boy pretty well polished off what was left. Even Terra had some, though she had to eat very, very slowly considering how long it had been since her stomach was occupied by actual nutritious solids. Though no one else seemed to notice, Raven was highly aware of the fact that Skye ate nothing. When all the pizza was but a pleasant memory, Robin gathered everyone's attention and got order in the exceptionally casual debriefing. The time had come to start deliberations, and he was about to get the ball rolling himself when Skye spoke up for the first time that night.

"I think I've got things pretty well figured out," he said calmly, but with such authority that everyone immediately switched their attention from Robin to him, including the boy wonder himself, "so listen up for a minute and see if I'm making sense or not. First of all, I'd like to make it clear that, to the best of my ability to divine, we are currently sitting very well as far as the impending apocalypse is concerned."

"Well that's a load of _my_ mind," muttered Beast Boy sarcastically, the joke being that he'd forgotten all about that in the excitement of last night and Terra's return, so little had the abstract threat come up. Well… no one got it, and he was pretty well ignored as Skye continued.

"It still exists, so they're not completely beaten, but I think Slade's attacks and the ruckus Beast Boy and Cyborg caused in that drone base have set them back for some indeterminate period. If he wasn't such a vicious, murdering scumbag, I'd say we owe Slade some thanks on this. It was his violent territoriality that drew out our opponent's resources and core members so quickly and fucked up their operations so badly. Without him, I'd say we'd still be sniffing around cluelessly for the slightest inkling of their location."

"Well if you like Slade so much, why don't you marry him?" Cyborg taunted immaturely, merely intending to make his own contempt for the persistent, utterly deadly cockroach as clear as possible. Skye understood this and countered icily.

"Normally I'd give the suggestion due consideration, but after examining what all was done to Terra under his ministrations, I fully intended to use my every power to _execute_ him the next time I lay eyes on him. I suggest you all do the same." The threat was delivered with perfect emotionless power, and a chill ran through all present at the utter, undeniable resolve in his tone. Robin frowned deeply, considering his own lust for Slade's blood as he replied.

"This from a man who's proud of his lifetime zero body count," Robin called Skye's bluff powerfully, and the others couldn't help but feel pride in the way their leader handled himself.

"That's a zero _innocents_ body count," Skye countered expertly, "I've had the unfortunate duty of eradicating many beings who were directly threatening my life or that of others, and Slade is nothing but another deadly threat that should be met in kind. At least that's the way I see it." His tone was still dangerously empty, and the others glared at him, highly aware of how little they actually knew him. Robin noticed this distancing, then struck out to dispel it as best he could.

"Hey, whatever your philosophy is, just remember that we're the law around here." Robin's voice got really grim here, and everyone listened intently as he finished with, "If you off anyone in cold blood, even if that person deserves it as richly and completely as Slade, we'll take you in." There was a long pause.

Everyone burst out laughing at the same instant, and the icy atmosphere was broken a million times over by the explosion of humor. It was a little while before everyone could calm down again, but when they did, Robin got the ball rolling again.

"So Skye, what do you think our next move should be? You know these guys, right?"

"Well, there is of course that big oaf I managed to ID the other day. From the descriptions you guys gave me, I can make a good guess at who that pyrokinetic is. I spotted another I recognize when Raven and I went after Terra last night. A fourth came to my attention through my own means, and with him I think I begin to get a decent picture of what they'll try to do now." He paused, apparently in deep thought again, but Robin had an eye on the time and the mayor's ultimatum in mind, and so he tried to hurry it along.

"_Which would be_?" he asked pointedly, and everyone but Skye gave him a glare for his clear impatience.

"They're going to go to ground," he continued, ignoring Robin's faux pas and maintaining his steely emotionless presence. "After last night, they can't afford anymore big, flashy villain battles in the city lest higher powers come to intervene. Now that they know I'm here, they're going to assume that any overt operations are going to be highly risky, and so they'll bring pretty much everything to a stop while they try and get rid of me, and by relation, all of you. It won't be anything obvious, some of them are masters of the viciously subtle, and it's likely none of the coming attacks are even going to seem like attacks until we've already been hit hard. The weapons of choice for this kind of fighting are despicable: politics, public opinion, bribery, shady dealings, and all the stuff that makes me ill."

"Well I wouldn't worry too much about the political front at least," Robin began to think out loud when Skye had finished. "We're back by the mayor as far as anyone could ever be, and his political position is secure. We're going to have to do a few things to ensure that security—"

"Oh no, _now_ what does he want?" Raven complained, and she was backed by a general groan from the others. The mayor's PR schemes were always legendary, and they were never terribly considerate of a Titan's desire for privacy. Raven in particular was still angry about the camera crew that had tried to sneak into her room during their tour of the tower, not to mention the teen girl's magazine that he'd set her up with an interview for. The other's experiences weren't quite as bad, but no one particularly enjoyed the stunts.

"Chill guys, it's nothing special this time. We've got to hold a press conference and assuage public fears, y'know, generally get the Press of the mayor's ass. We're pretty much the only people that can assure them that the city isn't going to be blown up or set on fire anymore."

Everyone agreed reluctantly that this was indeed their duty, and there was general muttering among Starfire, Beast Boy, and Cyborg about what they thought of the press. Raven didn't bother to express her contempt as it was well known, particularly by the several paparazzi cameramen who still had terrible nightmares that doctors and psychologists where helpless to explain or prevent.

"Anyway, I'm interested in hearing what you think we should do next Skye," and Robin gave the guy a look, trying to draw his attention. The way he kept looking off at nothing so fixedly was clearly getting to the rakish leader.

"What can we do?" Skye expressed his helplessness in an unexpected turn. As of yet he'd never had quite this tone of abject uselessness, and it was more than a little surprising. "For the time being, we're completely back on the defensive. We don't know where they are, they have all they technology they could ever need to prevent me from locating them with my powers, and all inroads to discovering their location were eradicated when Slade drove them underground with his attacks. All we can do is wait for their next strike and hope there's enough of us left afterward to trace it back to the source. Barring some kind of spectacularly lucky break on our part or an extremely unlikely screw up on theirs, there's really nothing we can do for the time being."

"So we're _helpless_?" exclaimed Cyborg, effectively articulating the common disbelief in the room. They looked at each other, and it was clear they were imagining what it would take to keep them from stopping someone. Even Slade, an ultra-mastermind, had fallen eventually before them… sort of. As it began to sink in, the mood started to disintegrate.

"Not _helpless_, no." Skye was being mysterious again, and now everyone was annoyed. Before he could get yelled at, he elaborated with, "As Robin pointed out quite astutely, you are the one and only force capable of lifting the blanket of fear off the people in this city. We've driven the enemy back, set them on their heels, we're forcing them to strike out from the shadows rather than risk the flashy assassinations they've been only too happy to train on you all and me both. Round one goes to us, and round two will be won or lost in a public arena unlike any battlefield a weapon is useful on."

"Our first move should be to dissipate fear, and to do that, you should go back to your regular lifestyles as quickly and publicly as possible. There will be exceptional danger of a sneaky strike from our friends in their rat-hole, so I'd advise against ever going out of your fortress here alone, but you need to be very publicly calm and active so people get it into their heads that there isn't anything to be afraid of anymore."

"But…" and it was Beast Boy who was confused this time, "there are five ultra-deadly space aliens running around in the darkness with blood on their minds! What's NOT to be afraid of?"

"That's the whole point Beast Boy," Robin answered before Skye even had a chance, "our job is to make people feel safe when there isn't any reason to feel safe, because there's _never_ a good reason to feel safe. This city is a powder keg that could go up at any moment, and it always has been. Why do you think the mayor backed us and got funding for this highly visible symbol of our presence we've been living the high life in?"

"Uhh, because that's the kind of star treatment I _deserve_?" and the sad part was that B.B. seriously meant that. Cyborg beat Robin to giving him a hearty smack to the side of the head, then picked up where the shorter man left off.

"Robin and Skye are right, and _I_ agree with their plan. We need to get the city back to normal as quickly as we can, then wait for these alien scumbags to slip up. That much at least is obvious, but what I wanna know is what we plan on doin about Slade!"

"Oh yes, he is owed a great deal of pain—I so swear on my _hraknar'bijon_!" Starfire jumped in immediately, her eyes glowing dangerously at the thought of getting her burning hands around that monster's armored throat.

"I wouldn't worry about him," Skye commented, almost smug this time as the slightest grin split his features for the first time all night. "He's _already_ reaping what he's sewn in the form of retaliation from the ones he struck out at."

"And _how_ do you figure _that_ Mr. Psychic Man?" Cyborg asked contemptuously, tired of him always knowing about things. It was a common emotion to everyone that had had their desires for revenge scoffed at a moment ago, and Skye was getting three unpleasant glares currently. Robin already had an idea of what he meant, and had gotten past his own frustration a while ago.

"I'm just saying, that guy bit off more than he could chew when he went after the guys we're up against. Or rather, he may or may not be able to chew what he's got on his plate right now, but he's beyond doubt too occupied with that for us to have to worry about him. What I'm saying is that one of the criminals I identified earlier was a vegoid criminal mastermind who's more than earned an epic reputation with the IDP. My guess is that he caused her a few massively hemorrhaging puncture wounds and thought he had her at his mercy, I can't imagine any other scenario that would have him taking _that_ viper into his custody."

"I'm still waiting for the part where Slade faces trouble man," Cyborg expressed his impatience with Skye's narrative technique, and the deepening glares from the other end of the couch reinforced this.

"Well, damn," Skye shook his head, "I'm just saying that there's no way you can kill a vegoid with puncture wounds, the bastards are more resilient that the weeds they evolved from. I'm willing to bet anything that Slade's having very unique trouble with the vegetation in his base right now, the kind that, if it doesn't kill him, will certainly eradicate what's left of his power base after the battles he leapt into. I'd feel sorry for the trash if I was capable of giving a _damn_ about such living filth. Those aliens… they'll do far worse things to him than any of us would ever even _consider_."

"Well I had some rather '_unique'_ plans for him—" Beast Boy began viciously, but Skye gave him a knowing look and a shake of his head.

"Worse than that dude, _much_ worse," Skye informed him, and Beast Boy paled seriously, wondering what could _possibly_ be worse than what he'd been planning, then deciding that it was better for his peace of mind that he never find out.

"Besides, he's not the one I want, at least not primarily in connection with what happened to Terra here. I'm _much_ more interested in getting my soul-eradicating grip around the animal that raped her mind. I… I got a good enough taste of his powers… y'know, from what he'd left inside of her head… that I _may_ be able to make up a composite sketch of him. You might even know the guy, which could make my job a little easier."

"We'll do what we can," Robin was supportive as Skye became hesitant, the exceptional hate he was masking with that hesitation apparent only to Raven, who added it to her list of things to ask him about. "In the meantime, now that you've brought up Terra, do you mind letting us in on, well, how she's doing and all?" There was a murmur of agreement from around the room, and Skye was no longer the object of any emotion other than hope.

"There's some good news at least," he began, and there was a kind of sigh through the gathered people in response. "The new technique I devised is working beautifully, and she should be ready for the opening stages of memory recovery by tomorrow. It's a delicate process, I mean, I've got to reconnect the endlessly complex matrices of her mind in such a way as to balance recovery with the ever looming threat of overburdening her recovering ego and melting her personality beyond recovery. That sounds bad, but I'm an expert at this, and all it means is that it's going to take a while before the person you know will look at you with comprehending eyes again."

"Can it really be that hard?" Cyborg asked, fully aware that he was utterly ignorant of what it took to put a mind together. In the end, he just wanted as much assurance as possible that his friend was coming back.

"The human mind is a bundle of untold billions of connecting neurons linked in networks that put the complexity of any computer this planet has ever produced entirely to shame. Tracing and repairing those connections is a process of repetition, exploration, and constant backtracking. In the end, its hundreds of times more complicated that destroying a mind could ever be, which is one of the reasons I like healing minds so much. It's a challenge that never gets old. Terra is going to be fine."

"Except," and with this one word he put the entire room on edge, "there could be a minor complication with one aspect of her recovery."

"_Well what is it man_?" Cyborg continued to be the spokesman of those hanging on Skye's every word for want of Terra's restoration.

"Her language center: quite totally _eradicated_. Technically speaking she should be able to talk right now, though I couldn't imagine what she would have to say, but the part of her brain that handles the interpretation and expression of words is utterly shot. I've given her the ability to comprehend basic requests through a stopgap technique that will never work for actually curing her aphasia, and I'm currently quite stumped as to how to fix that aspect of her injury."

"You mean…?" Cyborg didn't dare finish the thought, and Skye didn't bother to either. It was clear that he meant there was a chance she'd never talk again, and everyone began to pray silently that this would not be the case.

"I'll do what I can, I'm certain there's a way to fix the problem… I just… haven't _invented_ it yet." The room was back to being depressed again, and he continued in a more subdued tone in sympathy with this. "The only other thing I can think of is the fallout from the physical aspects of her abuse." That returned the room's attention to him quite utterly.

"Her malnutrition is going to be a snap. A little metabolic manipulation in the right parts of the brainstem and she'll be back to her ideal weight inside of a week, a little exercise will take care of the rest from there. The question I gotta ask _you_ guys is weather or not you want to have the brain surgery preformed."

"WHAT?" and it was everyone, including Raven, that stumbled over this statement. Skye just looked at them all like they were messing with him, then waved at Terra and asked her to come over. Standing, he passed a hand near her head, causing her to slump forward limply into his arms. With the room looking on in suspense, he pulled back a fold of her long hair to reveal a shining metal fixture imbedded into her skull.

"What the _fuck_ is that man?" Cyborg snapped, most of the rest too nauseated to say anything right away. He recognized cybernetics when he saw it, but he'd never seen one like that before.

"You guys… sorry, I keep forgetting that I have deeper perception than you guys. I thought you noticed this. To answer your question, it's a very primitive neural interface that's been surgically integrated into her brain. I can only imagine what it was used for, and I'll spare you the details, but I wanted to know if you want it taken out or not."

"FUCK YES!" snapped Beast Boy, who was gripping his stomach with one hand and head with his other, trying not to imagine what it was like to have a piece of steel in his skull. Reconstructive work like Cyborg's was one thing, but the plug in Terra's brain had _no_ place being there.

"As I assumed, but the fact of the matter is that the operation to remove it is even more dangerous that the one that put it there. I'm qualified for the surgery, but I'll need an O.R. staff, and I don't know if… well…"

"Terra is still a wanted criminal," Robin supplied without preamble, "Even if she is currently pending on her death certificate. Breaking her presence to the public is going to be tricky, and we can't risk it until after her mind is restored. We'll leave the call on the surgery up to her once she's competent to make it for herself." His words were quite final, and everyone sort of nodded, none willing to think too hard about how they would ever convince the people to trust Terra ever again.

"Quite right Robin, I had sort of assumed that's how we would handle it. Anyway, is there anything else? It's getting kind of late, and I wanted to do some prepatory work to get ready for tomorrow's operations on this one," and he hefted Terra fully up into his arms, her slight body lying limply.

"Yeah, sure, just… nah," Robin aborted whatever it was he had intended to say. "I've got a call or ten to make, the rest of you should get some sleep. Tomorrow is going to be another LONG day." With that, Robin pushed himself up, did a back flip over the couch, and began to walk towards his room, deep in thought. Starfire watched him leave over her shoulder, then turned back to the others.

"Friends, I must excuse myself as well. I think I will do the 'turning in' early tonight, I am still quite exhausted from the battle this morning." With that hastily made explanation, she took off toward the same hallway Robin had gone down, interesting because her room was closer if one went down the opposite one.

"I've got to get some work done on Terra," Skye put in his two cents, "and I figure her room would be the best place for that. The psychic imprint she left on everything in there should aid the process somewhat." Without waiting for a response form the others, he began to carry her back to her room. Beast Boy stood up in flash and began to follow, muttering.

"Be damned if I leave him alone in there with her," was the gist of it, and Cyborg actually got up and followed.

"Hey, I'll stick around for a while too, but I gotta go get to work on breaking out the spare Birdcycle before it gets too late. I swear Robin wrecks way too many of those things, I can't believe Wane Industries keeps sending him replacements!" Cyborg's hasty egress left Raven alone in the common room with nothing but a couple of empty pizza boxes and the lingering smell of pepperoni. She found herself deep, deep in thought, and for that being alone was definitely best.

Titans Tower Rooftop, _very_ late

Raven sat alone, meditating in the moonlight cast so starkly on the concrete, metal, and black surfacing of their lonesome fortress. A calm wind blew gently through the late-summer night, bringing with it the scent of smoke and rubble from where buildings were still smoldering in the city. The bay was so calm it might as well have been a sea of grass, the sound of gentle breakers splashing against the cliffs below the only thing disturbing the pristine stillness that this hour of the morning brought. Hovering in midair, Raven was easily able to reach complete oneness, a delightful change from the tormented struggle it had been at the same hour yesterday. Exactly like yesterday, however, there was a sudden presence at her side where none had been before.

"Hello Raven," said Skye, and Raven was so startled she actually fell out of the air and smacked into the roof below.

"Ouch! … _Damnit_…" she needed to say nothing more, and was simply grateful that there was no hint of humor from Skye now that he'd proven he was still able to mask himself from her well enough to sneak up on her.

"_Sorry about that, I had to at least try. Professional pride and all_." Skye had switched to telepathy, and immediately Raven was granted a buzzing connection to his mind that tickled and danced along her senses like delicate frost.

"_I'll show you where you can stick you professional pride you asshole, and if you EVER do that again, I'll DEMONSTRATE where you can shove your professional pride using a CACTUS!_" Her anger rang empty, and Skye actually did transmit a touch of humor from the cold pits of his soul now. After a moment of trying to feel upset, Raven matched it with a similar wisp of humor, unable to keep herself from delighting in the intricacies of the mental contact they were now sharing.

"_What are you doing up here Skye?_" Raven found herself asking, though she already knew the answer.

"_You wanted to talk, so let's talk. I doubt we'll cover everything tonight… but there's nothing to say we couldn't make a habit of this_." Raven was picking up a touch of something… she couldn't tell quite what, but suddenly she was aware of him as more than just another friend, and she ran her powers through the wringer to keep _that_ down. She'd almost forgotten he could have that effect on her.

"_Okay, yeah, I did have some questions that couldn't wait. That and there were some things we should… y'know… go over_." Skye met her suggestions with a feeling of openness without actually transmitting any words, and once again she was impressed with how accomplished he was at such communication. It made her regret how little opportunity she'd had to practice in her life.

(All dialogue is telepathic)

"First of all," she got started before he could begin to analyze what she must be transmitting to him, "we need to talk about what you told us about Terra's healing process. You weren't being totally honest with us were you?"

"I was wondering how much of that tissue of lies you managed to catch. I'm glad you understood their necessity, what I told Beast Boy was already enough to worry him after all. No, actually, that was the first time I've ever used that technique. I got the idea from the control structure that was dominating her mind, then just combined it with my favorite regenerative force construction and viola—the most impressive reconstructive tool I've ever lain senses on. It really is a breakthrough—I can't wait to submit it to the medical society."

"There was something in particular though," Raven persisted, the thing she'd been wondering about cropping up, even though she knew she probably shouldn't ask about it, "You said you didn't know why Terra was afraid of being touched, and you were lying."

"Oh," and Skye was flushed with an incredibly uncomfortable feeling that passed through Raven just as fiercely. "Terra… that would be what happened to her during her captivity. Its not the kind of thing that you'd appreciate me telling you about, not tonight. We'll have to talk about it eventually, so lets just leave it until it cant be avoided any longer. You'll thank me." The utter certainty she picked up from him along with the undercurrents of revulsion and sadness relating to what he was concealing convinced her that she'd been right to fear asking the question, and she let the matter drop.

"Well, okay, I'll take your word for that. I suppose the only other thing that was bothering me was that… it's a little hard to believe someone so young is doing medical research for ultra-tech alien think tanks though." She'd stated her mild doubt, and was gratified to sense that he felt it was only natural.

"I get that a lot. I did most of my learning in the few spare hours I had to myself when the stuff the IDP was jamming down my throat let up. Age eleven to twelve was the duration of their training program, the one they give involuntaries, which is what I became when they realized I wasn't susceptible to hypnotic indoctrination. I spent my extra time learning mind healing on the net. Combine a photographic memory with subconscious information condensing technology they use to teach nowadays and it didn't take long at all for me to know everything there was to know about it."

"Over the years I've taken similarly condensed courses on everything from comparative xenobiology and biochemistry to a complete surgical primer and confirmation course. You'd be damned surprised what you can learn on your own when you've got the mind for it, and I pretty much never stop reading, studying, and improving myself in the dead time between missions out in space. It's kind of my hobby, considering I'm always too alone to have a gregarious pastime."

Raven considered his words, took into account that there was nothing to suggest he was lying, then accepted it as truth. She'd known there was something she liked about this guy, and that he was a voracious reader certainly struck her as a brilliant plus on the likeability scales. She formed a rather clumsy impression that she believed him and transmitted it as best she could, and got back immediately an appreciative sensation.

"That certainly explains a lot," she commented blithely, _very_ aware that her mood was at a high point she hadn't experienced in as long as she could remember. Something about being out here like this, talking with him like no one else she knew could communicate… it made her _happy_. It was exactly as pleasant as she'd imagined it being, which was an incredible thing, because nothing she'd ever expected to enjoy had ever delivered, other than a few books and some of the stage dramas Robin had dragged her to at the theatres back when they were still getting to know each other. The best part was, she could tell he was enjoying it too, and he _couldn't_ deceive her like this, not anymore than she could deceive him. She wondered for a while why she'd ever hesitated to touch another's mind this way, then recalled that she'd never met another capable of it and had been too frightened of Skye until quite recently to even consider it.

"Well I'm glad I could alleviate some of your concerns. I'm also glad you're not getting all uptight on me." There came a strange feeling with this thought, and she raced to interpret it, her confusion pushing on him and motivating some explanation.

"I just mean," He continued, "I was something of a child prodigy, and that meant a great deal of isolation. Most people think me arrogant and distance themselves when I tell them _why_ I'm able to do what I can do, but you… just haven't. It's a nice change." That assuaged her confusion alright, she knew about childhood isolation. It was hard for a half-demon to get friends among an icy monastic order in an alternate plane. She did her best to communicate this understanding, and suddenly things were close, really close.

Skye had been standing right behind her, the both of them staring out at the bay and the brightly lit cityscape. This odd proximity she felt compelled her to turn back to him, and she looked up to notice he wasn't wearing his sunglasses. His empty white eyes caught her violet ones, and they stared into one another's souls through the open portals. She saw the numbness, the ice within his heart, and he saw the heavy bonds attached to her wild passions, and there was a terrible ache to go with the kinship they felt in that moment. Quite the pair, quite the miserable, forsaken pair they were.

Without words or transmitted thoughts, going on the pure sensation of the moment, each of them raised a hand, bringing them close together, bridging the space between them with an arm each. When they were still almost an inch apart, their opposed palms began to leap and spark with stinging black and white electricity, and they dropped their hands, sighing in unison. Skye turned to look out at the stars, those pure white orbs wincing even at the weak glare of the gathered pinpricks of flickering illumination. Raven too turned away, her happiness in the utter rightness of the night tempered by the necessary understanding that came with it. They could never touch one another.

"Do you have any new theories about _this_?" she asked him, with little hope in her heart. His response was iced, as though he too were dealing with the ache she felt, and didn't care for her to feel his and vicea versa.

"I've been giving it a little thought, and I may have an idea. To explain it though, it's going to require a bit more trust than either of us has ever really given another person." He made the statement neutrally, and so Raven was unable to determine what he _wanted_ from her, probably exactly as he intended. Her body stiffened as she realized she'd have to choose, entirely of her own volition, to let him in where she hadn't let anyone, ever. It took her a minute.

"Okay," she eventually agreed, as completely neutral as he was at this point. The happiness was still there, but silent, because now she was also determined. Utterly and completely determined to know why the universe could get off visiting Skye and herself upon one another as it had. It was like some kind of sick joke, and now that she was a little less wary of him, she understood why he'd laughed the night before.

"For my part, I'm going to tell you something that I have never even _considered_ telling another living person ever before. I'm sorry, I know you don't like hearing other people's secrets." Skye was truly apologetic, and she actually took some comfort from the feeling he projected to complement this.

"Just go ahead. I've resigned myself to this now."

"I'm not a natural born human Raven," he said flatly and immediately, and Raven's heart skipped a beat as her deepest suspicions were confirmed. Somehow, she'd known nothing quite like him could come into existence by chance, no more than something like _her_ could. "I am not like other people primarily because I was made to be unique in this universe. Every aspect of my physiology and inborn ability, from my assortment of powers to the acuity of my mind, it was all an attempt at creating a eugenically optimized super being for a singular reason. My parents were indeed scientists abducted by the IDP, specifically they were genetic engineers, and I was one of their early experiments. I suppose it should suffice to say that I was _created_, created by real people with a specific _purpose_ in mind."

"Just like me," Raven supplied, and she felt the connection to him stiffen as she presumably confirmed his own suspicions about her.

"I kind of figured your patralineal ancestry had more than a slightly active hand in shaping what your powers would do. You are quite genuinely the most spectacularly adept shifter of reality I've ever even heard of, it was so natural to you that, along with what I gleaned from my confrontation with your nasty side, it became quite clear what he meant for you to be."

"A gate," Raven supplied a second time, feeling the deep ache as she remembered the prophecies the Sect of Azar had spoken of constantly during her youth. "A portal through which he'd invade the prime material and finally achieve another stage of his vicious, bloody ambitions."

"Quite. Your soul, your body, everything you were born with, is all attuned to the manipulation of reality, to the forceful motivation of trans-dimensional physics into stages it has never before been able to achieve. That is where the conflict in our souls arises, at the level we had no say in, in the features of our spirits that our parent's chose for their own selfish ambitions."

"What?" Raven was shocked, finally realizing what he was saying. He'd been used by his parents too, but for what, what could possibly have made him an antithesis to her?

"I was never the product my parents were after. I was the preliminary experiment, the prototype, the trial run, the guinea pig, and eventually, the control mechanism for the real products they completed later on."

"Later on? You mean!"

"My little sisters. The crowning achievement of my parent's ambitions, beings with powers that can only be imagined, power over reality, the power to create and destroy. That's what they were named after, 'Ora'— short for Oraborous, the infinity of all existence, and 'Zeph'— short for Zephyrum, the nothingness of ultimate oblivion. My kid sisters, the weapons of mass destruction."

"Oh Skye," and Raven felt an outpouring of sympathy she hadn't thought herself capable of anymore. It flowed out of her and into him, only to strike a wall that she didn't dare try to penetrate. She had one of her own after all, the wall that separated her from her deepest, most terrible pains lest they overcome her.

"Thank you, really, but that is my own pain as yours is your own. Neither of us is ready to share that. Anyway, we were one big dysfunctional family, my parents the mad scientists, my little sisters the 5 year old manmade demigods, myself the limiter, designed to keep my sisters from getting out of hand, and… my brother… the instigator, designed to initiate their abilities to their obscene upper limits."

"By Azar… I… I'm sorry," and for a while Raven could say nothing more. He did have deep dark secrets, and they were every bit as terrifying as her own. That such a twin spirit to her could exist in this universe was almost beyond her comprehension, and the two of them stood in silence for some time as it sank in. Finally, she tested her new comprehension.

"I was created to be a facilitator of dimensional manipulation, and you were designed to be an inhibitor. We can never touch one another because we were both sired by beings with power over creation but no care for the created or how they would suffer from their abilities."

"Such is the cruel poetry of life." The statement was an utter dismissal, a clear declaration that Skye refused to let the facts of their twin miseries get to him. Raven took solace in that, reinforcing her own spirit until she too was able to handle the knowledge. The silence stretched out for another long while, and she began to get curious once more. He knew this, and a sensation from him invited her to ask whatever she wished.

"Why didn't you ever say anything about your brother before?" She asked, and she immediately knew that he'd anticipated her question.

"_That _man… that _thing_… was never my brother. He and I, we were twins, just like my Ora and Zeph, identical in features but as different as two people could ever be. Unlike my sisters, we always _detested_ one another, and ours was a sibling rivalry marred by his boundless cruelty and my remorseless revenge. I… the only other thing I'll say for now is that he's the reason my sisters were trapped and I was pressed into working for the IDP. If not for him, I'd be living freely somewhere with my family."

"What about your parents?" Raven asked, unable to believe the people who'd created such fearsome beings would have simply allowed the idealistic lifestyle Skye so longed for. Her own father certainly wasn't letting her live her life the way she wanted it.

"Those nut jobs? They were no parents to me, nor to my brother or my sisters. I was effectively raised by robots designed for the purpose, leaving me utterly starved for human contact until my little sisters came along. In the end, the only good thing my brother ever did for me was put them out of their insanity so I didn't have to. They were standing in the way of his plans for intergalactic conquest, and he wasn't about to put up with that. Then, to get us out of the picture, he… disabled… my sisters, and left us to be collected by the IDP, who my parents had fled from successfully some years before."

"Disabled…" and Raven recalled something from earlier, something he'd been concealing, and then made an impressive intuitive leap that she immediately knew was correct. "He mindwiped them. _That's_ why you—"

"Heh, yes, exactly. The IDP secured them for study in crystal stasis, so at least they aren't loosing biological years while their minds are gone. I wonder if they'll even recognize me after I reconstruct them."

There was nothing she could say that could possibly impact the sadness in him at this moment, and so she stood silently while his powers robbed him of it. He had been right; learning the depth of his problems had done little but depress her, mirroring so terribly as they did the magnitude and span of her own horrific troubles. Two spirits, alone in ways that regular people would never be able to understand, burdened with problems that would break the average person, and cursed by their makers to be incapable of true love, even for one another. A sick joke.

"That's a lot to handle," she said simply, but the feeling passed between them, and they knew it was time to put a stop to the sharing, for tonight at least.

"But we're used to that by now," and Skye was totally right. Armed with knowledge now, if suddenly burdened by all kinds of new questions, Raven felt secure, complete, and able to deal with the world again in a way that had eluded her since she'd first come into contact with the incredible, frightening, magnificent man she'd met. This couldn't be last of these little chats they had, not if she was to maintain her sanity after the first taste of his life he'd given her.

"We should continue this talk sometime," Raven commented, and the shock of pleasure this caused Skye blasted straight back to her. She couldn't help but reciprocate, and they looked at each other, sharing a smile this time. "Just, I'm more used to mornings than nights. Do you think we could move this to after my morning meditation?"

"Uh, sure," Skye was taken off guard by a return to such mundane issues, but managed to take it in stride, "Just remember that I can't stay too long if it's at dawn. The rising sun, well, there isn't a lot of shade up here, and my skin…"

"I'm sure it won't be a problem. We can start tomorrow… so I guess I'll see you in a few hours. Good night." Skye barely had time to return her farewell before she'd slipped through space, and he caught her presence the next instant down in her room. If it hadn't been for the happiness that had been virtually dripping off of her, even after he'd burdened her with knowledge of his tribulations, he'd have thought he'd frightened her off. As it was, he couldn't, for every _shred_ of his vast perceptions, comprehend how he'd been so _spectacularly_ _lucky_ as to have met this woman. Or how cursed. He turned his empty white eyes away from the stars and focused them on his hands. What the hell was he getting himself into?

Downstairs, safely enclosed in her room, Raven was still coming down from the incredible high talking with him like that had given her. Chance had gifted her with a person uniquely equipped to understand her, and no matter what other misery might come along with this gift, she could not completely suppress the dangerously powerful joy this brought her. She exercised her powers on some objects she kept around for just that purpose, her mind racing with the things he might be able to help her with, or the things she might be able to help him with. At long last the universe had given her an opportunity, however maniacally bittersweet, and this one was not going to pass her by. At the same time, she couldn't help but wonder what the hell she was getting herself into here.

Preview:

Now did that kick ass or what? I read that ending section four times and still got chills. The number of different ways I can proceed from here is limitless, and just beginning to think about them allows me to completely forget how badly I'm failing my math class right now. In any case, the next chapter is going to be another dark one, a return to Slade and the color criminals. The plot will thicken like damp wood in—Chapter 23: The Other Side


	23. PIT pt4: The Other Side

Intro: Wow, this one took forever to get out, and is (relatively) short. I could go into great detail about why this is, but I'd be boring you I'm sure. Suffice to say that I haven't given up on this storyline, though I have had a great deal of other things to occupy my attention, not the least of which is another story I've started. Not sure when I'm going to post that one, but I'll let you know—it'll be arriving on before too long now. Here we have a rather provocative little number where I have, for reasons of said distractions, decided to accelerate the plot a shade. Hope the twists don't bug you too much, I've only been hinting at them for ten or so chapters.

Chapter 23 (Section 5, part 3): The Other Side

Slade's Secret Base

"You must understand, my _dearest_ Slade," spoke the disembodied female voice from some indeterminate location nearby, "just how _difficult_ it is to find a worthy opponent in this universe."

"Yes," Slade confirmed, answering calmly as he made his cautious way down the dark, featureless halls of his own inner sanctum, "I've had that trouble myself. I suppose I could see where you'd run into an identical problem."

"Oh, I'm glad I don't have to explain that to you then," the woman's voice spoke, and Slade continued in vain to determine just where it was coming from. "To answer your question, _that's_ why I was holding back before. It's simply been a little while since I've had to utilize _all_ of my abilities to take care of an opponent. For quite a long time now, I've had to operate under an extreme handicap to keep things _interesting_, and even then I've been generally matchless in the universe. You should be _honored_ that you've brought out this side of me, my _dearest_ Slade."

"Honored… _yes_…" Slade muttered, his fury restrained by the titanium willpower plating his mind. It had been hours now, an unending conflict, innumerable and meaningless units of time rushing by as he sparred with this incredible opponent. The transformation she'd undergone, the magnificent power she was marshaling in her effort to taste his blood, was intoxicating in its magnificence. So much was he enthralled in the duel he now waged that his natural frustration as her apparent invulnerability was overcome by the singing joy in his twisted heart. Such an opponent he'd only _dreamed_ of.

He eventually returned to his cautious stalking, all the while cursing the necessity of spreading his facility over so much area. Of course, his rapid transit system had been the first thing to suffer from biological sabotage, and now he was in these damned, unshielded maintenance tunnels. Local geology was working in this bitch's favor, as he _still_ had better than half a mile of ground to cover before he'd be in his research sector. A disembodied giggling, utterly effeminate and completely infuriating, told him that she intended to enjoy every minute of that journey.

The past eight hours had been a nightmare of incessant combat, his favorite kind to be sure, as the creature exercised its new, true, frightening power upon his base. Without form now, what had once been a mildly interesting example of the weaker gender had become a monster, a freak as detestable as any of the striplings that had blocked his path to supremacy these many months. She was now no longer the minuscule vessel of steel-wired strength that had nearly gutted him in the streets, but rather, and only as far as he'd been able to observe, some indescribable amalgamation of vegetation, a sentient plant with a terrible affinity for violence.

Such a thing hardly intimidated him, it was just another kind of foe after all, but disposing of her in this new form had proven… problematic. No matter what he did, he could not seem to cause her any meaningful harm, and even his endurance and arsenal would only last so much longer under the constant pressure she applied so strategically throughout this duel. She dogged his steps incessantly, striking out--  
Suddenly the air cracked with rending noise as a wall panel he'd been leaning against burst forth and pressed him through the air. He rolled off of it and was flipping away by the time it slammed into the opposite wall, coming out of the flip with a phaser blazing just in time to fry several titanic, 2 foot diameter roots. There was a hissing screeching sound as the fleshy brown pseudopods went up in flames, the lashing limbs slurping back into the wet earth behind the paneling. Slade waited for all of the motion to stop, then holstered his weapon.

After he'd left his control room so many hours ago, his progress through the base had been one botanical ambush after another. Ignorant of the danger, he'd walked right into the medical room to begin tracking her from the spot he'd left her, only to find her exactly where she'd always been. Inspecting the flaccid body on the gurney had rewarded him with an empty husk with an inner coating of that nauseating pink liquid and the knowledge that the creature he'd brought into his inner sanctum wasn't nearly as helpless as he'd believed. Until he was holding the pile of flesh and body armor in his hands, he'd almost been convinced that this was another outside attack, a strike from the woman's insipid allies. This battle had driven into him how mistaken he'd been.

The trip to his armory had been uneventful, made at full run, but he'd arrived to find all of his equipment infested with crawling roots that infiltrated his walls and dug themselves through his explosives and ammunition like a billion hard, unyielding worms. He'd salvaged a number of small bombs, and of course his laser weaponry was all powered by fuel cells he kept in liquid nitrogen storage, not that he hadn't had to chip the frozen, dead roots off of that before he could get any. That was around the time he realized that she was playing with him.

His reminiscing was interrupted by an explosion of movement from behind him, where the bare earth the last attack had exposed sprouted and crawled with green growing things. He turned and tossed a bomb to cover his escape even as he began to sprint down the hall. The metal flooring in front of him began to shudder, and he threw himself forward in a full dive roll, clearing that section just in time for the whole building to buck violently as a fireball blew down the enclosed space behind him. The shuddering floor exploded at the same moment into a rising tower of metal and greenery that he cleared just as his shoulder touched the floor, and by the time he was on his feet and running again it had been intercepted by the chasing flames. Shrieking and hissing echoed down the hallway as his ears cleared from the explosion, and he stopped to lean against a wall and take several long, deep breaths.

Ambushes, constant and incessant, as she toyed with him in this prison his base had become. He searched in vain now for some vital spot, some heart of the beast at which he could strike, anything to counteract her unfathomable advantage of position. As long as she continued to dictate the terms of this death match, as long as she held the ultimate high ground, buried in the rich soil surrounding his fortress, he would not be able to defeat her. This fact gnawed at this acute mind as he worked through his entire knowledge of botany in search of some action he could take against her. In the end, she was but a weed, a festering lump of floral biota that would bend to his will just like everything else in this world, if only he could find the correct _stimulus_. He knew where he had to get to in order to have a chance in this, and so did _it_, and thus the constant harrying, the herding through every side passage and detour she could manage in an attempt to cut him off from his chemical warfare laboratory.

He had enough vile reagents stored there to wipe out all the flora in the state of California, and the Nuclear/Biological/Chemical (NBC) seal on that portion of his base would serve to keep out any inquisitive plant life. His detour to cut off main base power would prevent her from hacking the independent hard drive that controlled security there, even as it plunged them into darkness, and then there was always the 'backup' plan should even this fail. All he had to do was make it into that secure area, whip up his special formulation of Agent Orange, and begin to teach this alien freak what it meant to mess with the human species' crowning achievement—himself.

Slade checked the charge on his phaser as he began to stride down the hall again. A rustling in the air duct above him tipped him off, and he had five shots into the nearest vent before an eye's blink could have drowned out the flashing of incinerating air. The rustling stopped, and after a moment he began toward the tertiary route to his lab once more. As he passed under the spot he'd just quite literally ventilated, there was absolutely no warning this time.

A blossoming orange flower peeked out of the hole above him discreetly, and though he didn't see, it grew a wreath of serrated, pronged spines from the very heart of its bloom. There was a choking sound, and then the slightest tingling on his neck, and he spun and waved his arm just in time to nock down the barrage of barbs and come back with a purifying beam of hot energy. As the flower crisped and withered on its stalk, Slade bent to examine one of the barbs, only to drop it in disgust as it began to secrete some vile, stinking toxin.

A new rustling drew his eye and gun upward, where he was just in time to see something like thirty identical flowers emerge in three distinct bouquets, and his snapshots fried two as he backfliped away to the tune of an orchestra of choking and dodged the storm of virulently deadly needles launched by the third. He was around the next corner just in time for a second volley to paint the walls and floor with quills, and he froze on the corner, poised to strike until he knew the murderous flower arrangement was not going to follow him down this hall too.

Eventually, he pried himself off the wall, pressed a button on his belt that activated another auto-hypo injection of neural stimulants to fight off creeping fatigue, and began to stalk the hallways once again. It wasn't that much further now, and then she'd learn to fear him.

Oscillogenerator Secret Construction Site

Yellow floated his robotic exoskeleton along one of the building area's thoroughfares, giving a spot inspection of construction status as per White's orders. That pompous, insufferable slave driver _knew_ that such an inspection was a waste of Yellow's time and talents, but ordered them _anyway_ to demonstrate his power, and obviously to get Yellow away from the computer systems that gave him so much power. Having dedicated an insignificant portion of his mind to the menial task, his higher thought functions were free to occupy themselves by seething at White and laying out plans for his annihilation. He probably would have continued at these two tasks for some time if he hadn't happened to hover across the path of the being in question himself.

"No Blue, you _simpering idiot_, I _won't_ see to the restoration of you eye personally!" he was shouting into the pickup for his portable com link as he simultaneously directed a team of mind slaves through the construction of a delicate power coupling in the side of the epically large structure towering over them. "Because I don't have _time_, and even _possessing_ such I wouldn't _waste_ it on such trivialities! I KNOW it's your only eye, I'm not blind like _you_ pinhead! Just leave it to the regen tank, and leave me ALONE!" That was the end of the conversation as Yellow heard it, and though it hardly took much imagination to construct the other side, he none the less set one of his sub minds to the task of pirating the other half of the conversation for his archives. Even he had need of a touch of humor in his life now and then.

As his inspection rounds brought him closer and closer to the frightful being that had dragged them all to this dirtball backwater planet with his insane promises of galactic and intergalactic conquest, Yellow couldn't help but take in the creature's presence once again. It was certainly the kind of presence that took getting used to, like that of rattlesnake or a pluvian murder dragon.

Humanoid in form he was, identical, in fact, to the semi-intelligent simian species dominating this hole of a planet. Standing something like six feet tall as people here reckoned things, he appeared to be in the equivalent state of biological development as that displayed by the late teenage organisms Red had abducted so far. With the advancement of nanotechnology these days, that said little, especially considering the extensive work White had ostensibly had done, but it always intrigued Yellow to think that a being lacking even twenty cycles of experience at life could already be such a fiend. Bringing to his foremind the record of data he'd managed to claim from the IDP database, he began to review on the spot what exactly he was dealing with in White's rather diminutive but oh so dangerous form.

Records of his existence dated back to what must have been the incipience of his conception if his apparent biological age was at all accurate, prompting Yellow to think instantly of biological weapons programs he knew for a fact were running within the IDP's research branch in that period. However, for something like eleven cycles after the first records, all of which were censored beyond his ability to decrypt, there was no reference to him at all. This is where he arose again from obscurity, with several years of unexplained crimes, all involving unprecedented telepathic atrocities and horrendously violent power games, being attributed to him in retrospect by the IDP's investigation branch. The truth was that no one discovered White's existence and megalomaniacal goals until a number of cycles later still, something like the fifteenth cycle of White's life, with the appearance of one mysterious humanoid 'Skye,' in the IDP's death squad—err… elite special agent division.

For years the man had avoided all contact with the IDP, even though his criminal activities clearly violated the sphere of influence of interdimensional transmission and ultratechnology that those arrogant beasts so fiercely protected. Yellow himself hadn't lasted three quarters of a cycle after he'd first gotten into smuggling illegal slipspace drives, and so this fact rankled badly with the arrogant puddle of jello. Despite his obvious instability, the creature was devious in his plotting, meticulous in his preparations, and ruthless in his execution—more so than anyone Yellow had ever come across.

As he watched, the biped stood motionless, lording exceptionally exacting control over the meat puppets he'd personally lobotomized. A team of them worked in concert on the delicate parts of the superconductor conduit, all of them representing a tiny portion of that creature's almost infinitely divisible willpower. Suddenly, one of the emaciated zombies made a sickly groaning sound and collapsed, a large power coupling slipping to the ground. Yellow felt this neurons jangle as he braced himself reflexively, recognizing that particular component by the safety labels he'd personally applied to it.

The next moment there was a resounding 'whompf' and an incredible hiss as the cryogenic module released its payload into the workspace, a huge cloud of white mist expanding outward in a ballooning haze. Yellow backpedaled himself frantically, setting his hover cart to reverse in a desperate attempt to escape the creeping death of that white smoke, his minds boggling at the thought that White could be finalized by such an absurd stroke of chance. Flash calculating the odds, he felt a creeping glee as he set other portions of his mind to the task of organizing his escape from this rock and yet others to planning his return to business in the universe at large.

"DAMN USLESS SHITTY WORKERS!" bellowed an incensed voice from the middle of that creeping cloud of deathly cold, and Yellow stopped all his premature celebrations instantly. If he'd had anything even roughly equivalent to a heart, it would have dropped at the sight of White stalking stiffly from the cloud of murderously cold vapors, dragging the right side of his body in a hard limp as he escaped temperatures that should have left him stiff as a board.

Listening to him stream out a steady pulse of curses and swears in a number of popular languages, Yellow moved quickly to express the proper concern for him after that explosion, the trusty toady façade being a very safe one for White's unstable personality type. Greeting him with a sour glare, White continued to mutter as he staggered over to a convenient crate and slumped to a seat.

"Whige… if I mighe inquire… how exacgly did you survive ghag cryomass? That supercondugor operates at effecgive zero…" Yellow gurgled his confusion as politely as possible as he used a robotic arm to hand White a heating laser picked from the multitude of tools within his hovercarrier. White snatched the offered device and trained it on himself wordlessly as he smirked at Yellow's open confusion. He achieved a spectacularly malicious grin, then pointed it at the hovering bowl of slime next to him as the laser's gentle red glare melted flakes of frosted water vapor off his nondescript gray jumpsuit.

"Why Yellow…" White began, a frankly dangerous tone to his voice, "how terribly _considerate_ of you to ask." The tone and smile warned Yellow clearly, but now that he'd asked there was no escape, and a bubbling fear began to play through his biomass as that malicious duo put out clear threat against his life. "This seems as good a time as any then for me to comment about how interested I've become in this incredible curiosity you seem to have about my past pukewad." That was it then, Yellow's biomass went rigid in terror, he'd been found out. White knew he'd been snooping into his history.

"Now… Whige, ghere's no reason to be hasgy here, ig was an idle curiosigy… greally noging ag all…" Yellow began to make excuses as best he could through the terror impressed upon him by that murderous grin, his minds racing through thousands of simulations as to what explanation was most likely to save his life. White ended all that with a very few words.

"Meh," he scoffed dismissively as that smile of his metamorphed from dangerous to manic, an almost euphoric glow of irrational happiness overcoming White's clear viciousness in an instant that left Yellow reeling. "You'll never escape my geas Yellow, not as long as I live. There's no reason you can't know more about me… simply because I'll never die… and thus you'll _never_ have a chance to get away. The sooner you face up to this fact, the sooner you can get your small share of my galactic conquest."

Yellow was stunned by the change in White almost as much as he was terrified by the insight the creature had gained into his schemes. So far there had been no mention of his marshaling of Skye's resources against White… and there would be none, because there was NO WAY he'd learned of _those_. Keeping up an outer mask of cowed terror, Yellow's inner minds calmed down and began to absorb the facts of White's peculiar insanity, preparing to process the freely given knowledge approaching him. This episode he was witnessing could be critical in securing his escape.

"So you want to know of my past? You want to know why it is I can walk through a cloud of cryomass without being frozen into a meat popsicle?" White's voice was fluctuating oddly in tone, unable to hold a continual thread as he began to speak of himself. Without saying more to answer his question, he giggled insanely and flipped the heating laser into his right hand. Before Yellow's sensors, he pointed it at his left hand and slowly began increasing the intensity one notch at a time. The variable laser was at heart a high-power cutting tool, and in seconds the humanoid's hand was bathed in a red light used to shear ultradense alloys. His laugh reached a towering frantic pitch as the flesh on his hand blackened and crisped, smoking flakes dropping of in clods and lumps.

"Do you SEE Yellow? Do you see my PAIN?" White screamed, whipping the charred lump of flesh through the air to press the baking, sizzling meat against the sensor array on the front of his hovercarrier. Had Yellow possessed any concept of what it was to have limbs, he would have been nauseated. As it was, he looked through the bloody, blackened mess to see… metal.

He was synthetic! He didn't freeze in the cryomass because of an internal temp-sink for the power core. Yellow tried to conceive of how White could have concealed such a thing from everyone for so long, how that much metal could escape his own sensors and those of the IDP, how the maintenance and service had been kept secret, and as he did, White passed from his episode and back into silence.

"Whige… how did you geep…"

"It matters little the _how_ my dear lump of bile..." White had regained his composure, apparently, "But _so_ very much more so the _why_."

"_Why_ did you geg the syngetic—"

"DROP THE ACCENT BEFORE I _COOK_ YOU!" White snapped suddenly, the wave of pure psychic force coming off of him sizzling across Yellow's mind shield and exploding the heads of some nearby workers, the clouds of red haze floating the ground to land on the limp, decapitated bodies as the utterly cowed mentality altered his translator's audio configuration on the fly.

"Uh, you were saying then sir?" spoke a nondescript robotic voice, as completely devoid of emotion as any computer's, and White relaxed visibly as that nagging bite to his ears finally came to an end. Openness like this was so much more convenient than the dance of deception and tolerance of earlier days. For the powerful and the subjugated to be securely in their respective places… it was the way White liked things.

"Much better. Now, as I said, the important thing, the thing that matters about why I am what I am, is _why_ I was forced to replace fifty percent of my _perfect_ body with these disgusting, inefficient, ugly mechanical placeholders. I'm going to tell you, as I said, because it would simply be that much more representative of my ultimate power over your worthless fate." White was speaking calmly, gazing distantly at the bare metal from which all the charred meat had fallen, the tri-tanium claw of his cybernetic hand. The instability in his personality would have been contemptible if it weren't for the fact that he could eradicate a person in an instant… which promoted it to terrifying.

"Are you familiar with a condition known as gemini antipodal aurectomy?" White asked suddenly a moment later, and Yellow allowed the suitable pause for the rhetorical question. "Of course you don't, because it's a completely unique, artificial condition devised by my creators. Brilliant in the extreme, visionary even, GAA takes a single spiritual force and divides it between the corporeal matter of two virtually identical genomes. In such a way, the neutralizing opposing energies held within every soul can be separated and enhanced, leaving two beings infinitely more powerful than anything that soul could have been when confined to a single lump of biomass."

Yellow's minds worked frantically to decipher the unspoken portions of what he was being told, cross-referencing and making leaps of intuition and logic that his species was well known for. In the seconds during which White was distracted by the need to direct mind slaves with a prohibitive amount of his consciousness, Yellow snapped up the answer. GAA. White… and… Skye?

"However," White continued, Yellow undergoing a heavy realignment of all his perceptions as the enormity of this concept drove home. "There was a little something my progenitors failed to account for when they split a single soul between two beings. I mean, do you _know_ what _happens_ to flesh that lacks an underlying life force to support it?"

"I—"

"_DECAY! ROT! DEATH_!" White shouted to the room, leaping to his feet and thrusting his synthetic arm into the air. "Those _fucks_ condemned me to _rot_ in my own living body! To feel my organs and flesh decompose and fall dead to the ground, even as my perfect genes struggled to express their divine magnificence!" Yellow was accosted by a pummeling wave of psychic force, his mind shield flickering into a brilliant orange aurora under the force of White's passions, mind slaves all over the room falling dead to the ground, belching their feed pap onto the floor, or exploding into spheres of shattered skull and brain matter. The construction site was left quite a mess, and almost out of hand, White ordered robots and what mind slaves were still ambulatory to begin cleaning up the mess. He was calm again, staring down his body with those horrific, empty eyes at his mechanical left side.

"Of course, they suffered justly for their crimes against me. I didn't know _this_ would happen at the time… but in retrospect the fate I granted them fit nicely with their actions. To think I believed myself to be merely securing the universe for my future conquest when I finalized them… but no matter, it all worked out in the end. My only solace in the matter is that my… 'counterpart' suffered the same fate as myself. He must have… yesssss…" With that final hiss, White stalked off, the sluggish motions of injured mind slaves stopping as he snuffed the ones that wouldn't recover and whipped the rest back into action.

Yellow was left cold, his biomass shivering uncontrollably in the wake of that monster's passing. He'd known the crook was evil, that he was megalomaniacal, even that he considered life to be expendable. Flaws all around to be sure, but nothing particularly unforgivable in the grand scheme of things, he'd done good business with far worse entities in that respect. No, the thing that chilled Yellow's goo, the thing that filled his many minds with revulsion, was this most recent revelation. White was _completely_ unhinged, insane, out of his right mind. He'd been free of such episodes thus far, but if his insanity expressed itself in random violence and emotional instability like that often… well, he was going to get them all KILLED! Or perhaps even just kill them himself in a fit of some insignificant sound and fury. More than ever, Yellow was determined to escape, and he worked his neural connection to his computers as he set the next phase of his manipulations into action.

White was in a delirium of pleasure/pain as he stalked through his secret underground domain. On his right, the comforting enormity of his secret weapon sat in its immenseness, hulkingly huge in the cavernous space around them. All around him, his mind slaves worked their meaningless, valueless lives away at his whim, a tiny portion of his mind constantly tweaking their actions, directing everything around him in a symphony of motion that he constantly tracked and yet never consciously took any part in. As he moved he considered… _things_.

Things had been odd for him since his latest defeat by… _that_ man. It wasn't as though he'd never lost to him before, but this one had had that strange effect on him, had thrown him into a funk of a kind he couldn't quite wrap his expansive mind around. Even now, he vaguely recalled having a conversation with Yellow only moments ago, but had no concept of what he'd spoken to that disgusting puswad _about_. It was probably just orders for the last few building materials he needed to complete his device, and so he let that concern float away in the stew his mind had become.

Instead of wasting a moment's concern on his minion, White turned his thoughts to the next phase of his plans. He'd have to find some new way to distract his opponent, clearly, and he felt that it would take little effort to range the general public against him as he had on several worlds where they'd sparred like this. That wasn't the problem at all really, rather, the acquisition of those special components he needed to complete his grand device. He reviewed his plan for this strenuously as he entered his office at the edge of the compound, locked the door behind himself, and proceeded over to the adjoining biological accommodation facilities.

Breaking into the IDP's special holding facility wouldn't be easy, not by any stretch of the imagination, and he wouldn't be able to use the others for this either, not with Green out of the picture and everyone else baiting his opponent's attention away from the real threat. He paused here for a moment as he splashed some water over his face, rubbing the chapped flesh vigorously, wondering momentarily why the left side of his face was getting so scratched up. Stopping, he glared at the fleshless mechanical skeleton that was his hand, paused in silent confusion as he tried to remember opening it for maintenance, then shrugged away his concerns and pulled a metal tub out from under his sink.

The tub was full of pink goo, and when he dipped the metal hand in, it came out coated in the viscous slime. An electrical current ran through it the next moment, and in seconds he had a perfectly formed hand once again, completely real and living in every aspect except actual fact, fully able to stand up to any test, and containing special nanodevices that would tell any sensor directed his way that it was a calcium-bone skeleton beneath the living flesh. As long as it was on his mind, he also took this moment to get a good look in the mirror.

The autoflesh on the left side of his face was scratched and bleeding, but knitted cleanly as he watched. Feeling over the strong, pale features, he paused to look into his own eyes. A thrill ran through his body, a flash of hate so strong he could hardly contain it, the same one that always staggered him every time he was forced to look at his own visage. So much he reminded himself of _that_ man, that detestable being who possessed the other half of HIS soul. The only comfort he had anymore was in the infinite reflections of the mirrored contacts he kept over his eyes. The clear image of himself/that man bounced back and forth a thousand thousand times into the distant depths of his own eyes.

What had his creators been thinking? He was willing to grant that they built him with certain desires in mind, and that the demands of gene linking left him without melanin in exchange for his powers, but why still, _WHY_ had they left such a blatant imperfection in his immaculate DNA? Albinism, huh, he hadn't stood for that for a moment, and he listened to the whisper of servomotors in his skull as he shifted his eyes back and forth to test their articulation. _Those_ useless eyes he'd gouged out with his own hands rather than put up with, months before the GAA rot had set into his left side. The mechanical ones with their utterly black, mirror-polished surfaces were so very much more attractive, separating him at last from the identity of _that_ man.

His mind shifted back to his planning almost randomly, and had he been aware of his brooding at all, he would have been concerned by this leap. The IDP special holding facility, the best kept secret in the cosmos… and _he_ knew where it was. After the ordeal of discovering it, extracting what he needed would be child's play. Because, of course, it didn't matter how quickly they completed the shell of his machine unless they also obtained the key components, the twin catalysts that would allow him to harness the energy of existence itself to his whims. The core containment chamber was done, two child-sized life support thrones to hold his two secret weapons in place.

It tickled him to no end that he would use his parents' legacy, the ultimate brain child of his creators, the most brilliant product of consciousness ever to exist, in his bid for material domination. How the pieces and parts of his creators that remained would twitch and jiggle in the coffee can he'd buried them in, should they know what use he would put their creations to. It wasn't that much short of the use _they'd_ had in mind, but it was so ideologically different… it was _beautiful_. Oraborus, snake who eats her own tail, the infinite, all that is, eternity. Zephyrum, the ultimate absence that allows all others to be, the nothing, the placeholder, zero. Those would be his weapons.

An interlude—Red

The finely cut man in his 20's sat at the bar in the nightclub and sulked slightly. He carried his right side a little tenderly, but not so much that it was noticeable on his chiseled body. There was a bottle of hard whisky on his one side and a bottle of hard vodka on the other, and in between was a row of several dirty glasses. Both bottles were half full, or half empty if you prefer.

"Ish… ish not even like I knew her that well…" Red slurred out to the barkeep, who did a great job of ignoring him and keeping perfect track of his tab at the same time. "I mean… I mean… she hated my gustth—my gustthh—my insides. She wouldn give me the timea day if I washh the last male in the uinvershh. But… but… sheshh gone now!" The extensive nature of his misery was clear to the barkeep, who continued to politely ignore him. It was early in the day still, and he had glasses to clean before the night rush came. Honestly if the guy wasn't in so good with the owner, he wouldn't have thought twice about sending him to an actual bar somewhere where a professional could listen to his sob story. This was his freekin night job for christsake.

"Oh honey," spoke the other barkeep, a young girl working her way thorugh college whose name he couldn't remember, "You need to sober up and forget about this other lady. I'm sure an attractive hunk of man like you can get plenty of other women…" As she batted her eyes at him suggestively, the barkeep got completely fed up and left them behind. Back at the bar, Red was highly receptive, seeming to loose about ten shots worth of inebriation in a few seconds as the woman really turned on the flirt.

"Yeah… Yeah you're right. Say, you wouldn't want to go out for a steak or something? I know this place that makes the _best_ rare steaks—"

"Oh now, I couldn't," she rejected coyly, stepping back from the radiant smile he put out suddenly, "I'm a vegetarian."

"Really? What a coincidence… I have vegetarians for dinner _all_ the time!" and Red began to turn on all his charm without shame. It was actually kind of sad how easy it was sometimes.

"Well, alright. I can order a salad or something," she gave in, as though there was some point at which she _hadn't_ been drooling over him.

"That's the spirit, I _promise_ you won't live to regret it." Chuckling internally at his own shallow wit, Red took the young woman by the arm and led her out the door, his metabolism destroying the alcohol in his system the minute he let off pumping it into himself. As he took in the potpourri of the woman's flesh, trying to imagine what it would taste like, trying to envision the sounds of her screams and the warmth of her blood and vitae on his mouth, he let thoughts of Green slip from his mind.

In the end, he never even really knew her as more than an unreachable goal, a meal he'd never have. It was a shame loosing her incredible mind as far as ditching that whack job white was concerned, but he was relatively certain that Yellow had something going on the side too, so even that didn't worry him too much anymore. She had been frightening, but still… not as scary as he'd always heard. What was it about her that had people so terrified, that prompted the IDP themselves to go out their way and lock her up? Ah well, in any case, he had something to occupy his mind and energies now. Licking his serrated teeth, he took another long drag of the woman's aroma, prompting her to brush away his overly forward nuzzling. Mmm, sweet anticipation.

Slade's Secret Base, halls near the biological warfare laboratory

Lasers blazing, Slade cut a smoking path through the hard greenery standing between him and his destination. The walls were alive, the ground was crawling, and the ceiling was hung with vines, flowers, seed pods, all rippling with death aimed his direction. As he burnt down another projective seed pod, torching it before it could put a hard pea of plant matter through his body armor, a flower dripped down to spray a cloud of paralytic toxins into his already dripping-wet biohazard mask. A few more of those would clog the filters and suffocate him, but he was a little too busy slicing hot light through vines as thick as his leg with thorns like wicked daggers to worry about such a passive expiration.

Twisting through a complex leap, he lashed out in every direction with burning death, a terrible screeching and hissing meeting his twin, high-powered hedge clippers. Landing awkwardly on the shifting earth, he threw himself forward to avoid a wall of poisonous prongs, then opened fire again to burn down the spearing thorns. His next roll caused him a flash of agony as a fresh coating of thorns on the ground stabbed his armor, penetrating slightly and drawing blood. Without time to worry about toxins there, he threw himself into a full-tilt sprint, guns blazing away at everything his eye could track, the flashing light, bursts of flames, and all-consuming shriek of agonized plant melding together into an unreal orgy of sensation that flooded his adrenaline-sharpened mind like the ultimate cocaine high.

An indeterminate period later, he caught site of the bio-lock, the entrance to his secured laboratory, and the incredible armada of resistance that still stood between him and it. Without thinking twice, he holstered his guns, pulled his last bomb from his belt, and flung it forward full force, pegging the door dead on as he drew his knives and dove into the writhing dirt. Several seconds of desperate struggling with strangling, stabbing vines, and the explosive turned the hallway into hell.

When he could see and hear again, everything was one bright orange glare from the fires, he switched to reserve oxygen from his mask and began to beat his way through incinerated foliage with his knives, slicing down vine after vine as the screech of dieing plant joined the roar of the flames in a delightful knell of misery. The space was a raging inferno, but his armor kept out the worst of it while he endured the ungodly heat that penetrated. In moments, he was at the lab door, and he initiated the secret manual override key he kept in his armor, working quickly to escape the heat and the counterattack his opponent was no doubt ranging against him even now.

Sliding the key into a locking bar, he twisted it hard, pulled out the manual control lever, cranked the door open, withdrew the key, slipped inside, and slammed the mechanism locked again from the counterpart panel inside. The sound of the lock clapping home was a delightful pronouncement of his ultimate victory, a single clang that trumpeted to the universe his superiority. Turning from the wall of security that would buy him the time he needed to cook up a more permanent solution, he sheathed his knives and stripped the filter mask from his faceplate. He took his first unfettered breath in an hour as he glanced into his lab, and it mutated into hideous hiss as his every muscle tensed in a spasm of fury and reflexive hate.

In an instant he was crushed by a wall of vines that wrapped him in a steely vice grip and dragged him into the room. His guns and knives, his garrote, his lock picks, his detonators, his utility belt, his amour, everything was striped off of him in a flurry of leafy motion as his arms were wrestled above his head and his legs were bound together. In seconds he was in the center of the room, striped down to this skin suit and his mask as an enormous branch jammed into this back and bent him backwards until he was utterly immobilized. His muscles bulged and rippled, tight cords of hard flesh flexing futilely against the overwhelming force ranged against him, but as his air was cut off by a noose of vines tightening around his throat, even this resistance came to a halt.

Left only semi-lucid by the strangulation, the world took on a shimmering edge he knew to be oxygen deprivation preceding to asphyxiation. Into his limited field of view, filling the world available to him from his single eye, there came a face of sorts, or at least a conglomeration of foliage that his failing mind recognized as a face.

"Oh Slade… how close you were, how very _very_ close." Her voice was a taunting tickle across his ears, and if he'd had the wind, he'd have snarled at her. As it was, he was saving the little bit he had left. "You wouldn't _believe_ the trouble I had to go through to get in here. I mean, stealing the _explosives_, building the _shaped_ _charge_, knocking out the _wall_, it's just _not_ the kind of thing you can do without fine manipulators. I think _that's_ why the humanoid form is so popular among this universe's intelligent and… _semi_-intelligent species."

That said, the face grew downward, as though the body was emerging slowly from the base of the hovering head, and in an explosion of motion, a full form bloomed out of the budding. Gracefully falling to the floor, Green stood up tall, a perfect humanoid body completely constructed of plant life, living bark, leaves, and stems all reaching, twisting, and combining into a spectacular female construction. Crowning her head was a fantastic drapery of willow branches and flowering vines that fell in flowing waves all the way down to her feet, and somewhere in that mess of weeds, a trail of core roots fed back up into the ceiling again, connecting her to the biomass surrounding his base.

"So Slade… before I, in my _benevolence_, extend to you the courtesy of _quick_ _death_ that you would have denied me… how does it feel to be beaten? Does it _sting_?" and she punctuated the question by stretching him harder over the branch, his spine creaking with the strain, discs threatening to separate over the nauseating stretch. She was obviously trying to wring the last breath from his body, to extract a gasp of agony from his lips before finalizing him. He knew this because it was what he would have wanted. Of course, he wasn't about to waste his last breath in agony, not when there was such a great joke being brought to culmination.

"Heh… heh heh heh… heee" Slade wheezed out a distinct laugh through teeth clenched in seizing, burning pain. His one eye was wide with hilarity, his oxygen deprived brain staggering through oceans of fury, hate, pain, and humor, the last showing the strongest and catching Green off guard. She sputtered in disbelief, stepping back in a swirl of her own flowering hair, then her ethereal, perfect face twisted in terrifying anger.

"What's so _damn_ funny?" she spat at him, and it was several long moments before she remembered herself and let off of wracking him far enough for him to draw a breath. As he wheezed for air, suspended off the floor in an unbreakable grip, the first thing he did as he fed his burning lungs was choke out ever louder laughter, reveling in the way that thing's face distorted as he taunted her in the moment of her 'victory.'

"Do you really…," he gagged and laughed at the same time, "think I'd come here…," he stopped to take a gasping wheeze, "without a solid contingency plan?" He was grinning manically under his faceplate, and his eye showed every moment of his incredible defiance to his opponent.

"Oh really?" her skepticism was clear, but he'd planted the seeds of doubt, he knew she couldn't be sure he didn't have a backup plan, and the best part was—he DID!

"Why yes… I am a cautious man after all. While I admit I never saw this _particular_ challenge coming, and while I also admit that I was ill-equipped to fight your _particular_ brand of attack… I'm confidant that you'll find my failsafe much more able to meet the challenge you've presented me with. Granted it's hardly a satisfying victory… but _I'll take it_." The edge on these last words tipped Green off at last, and her eyes widened in comprehension as she came to understand the particular form of failsafe he was talking about. She clearly hadn't thought him capable of it, but this humanoid form she'd granted him to interact with was showing that she believed it now.

"A death safety… linked to your vital signs yes?" she guessed, and he simply chuckled all the more at how much alike the two of them thought. "No doubt you've linked it to something nasty hidden away in your little hidey-hole… a hydrogen bomb… or perhaps a chroniton detonator? Hmm… no, no… let me _guess_," she chided him almost amicably when he began to breath a taunt of his own, her mannerisms almost pleasant as her mind worked at unraveling his surprise. "Yes, there do seem to be unusual amounts of refined chromium residue around the reactor core of your power plant." Suddenly, she turned a violent smirk on him, sliding in close until she was rubbing her body against his. "You _dog_ you, hiding a weapon like that in a place utterly incapable of supporting life! I guess I won't be killing you as immediately as I originally thought."

"Heh, yess, I was hoping that would be the case." Slade wasn't entirely sure what was going on, but suddenly, the fact that she'd technically beaten him all the way down to his suicide contingency didn't seem to matter anymore. He'd beaten her soundly in hand-to-hand combat between two humanoids, humiliated her even, and in light of that, his current situation was almost comically poetic. He HATED poetry, and it rankled him to be beaten in any way to be sure, but there was something here, an echoing spark of genius from this creature that he couldn't deny. Perhaps… perhaps there was one worthless old adage he might give some credit to here. If you can't beat them…

"Green, or at least, I believe that was what they called you—" he began, using a tone as confident and businesslike as he could manage considering his bound position. He wanted to make it clear he felt he was dealing with an equal, despite appearances.

"Your _organs_ would be incapable of producing the sounds that comprise my given name… so yes, that code will do for now." Her tone was imperious, but at the same time, receptive, and she was still extremely close to him. He could tell she was sensing something of what he had.

"It hasn't escaped my notice that you and I have similar opponents to deal with. It occurs to me that we may be of a great deal of use to one another, as such things go," he continued slowly, and her interest peaked visibly as she somehow managed to wrap herself around his muscular form even more closely.

"Well, I suppose a base for a base… and a humiliating defeat for a humiliating defeat may just about even the score between us. Go on monkey man… I'm listening…"

Preview: Now that that's behind me and similarly now that the term is over and I'll actually have TIME, the rest of this story should be easy enough to finish. This was always little more than a practice piece for me, and now that I've spent the better part of a year warming up, its about time for me to move on to other things. That said, stay tuned for what will probably be the last or second-to-last section: The Quiet War. It promises to be bitchin' good.


	24. The Quiet War pt1: New Beginning, New My

Intro: Well, this wound up being another long time in coming, and I must admit that it's all my fault. For some reason, when I have absolutely nothing to do, I become less motivated to engage in writing… try to figure that one out. Anyway, writer's block and the numerous publications I've finally released (check I have the same pen name there. Current releases are Mind Trust and Serenity of the Nine) should at least provide slight mitigation for my absence, as should the arrival of this nice, enticing chapter. Enjoy Peeps.

Section 6: The Quiet War

Chapter 24: New Beginning, New Mysteries (Section 6, part 1)

Titans Tower Rooftop

The new dawn in Jump City was not a silent, tranquil one. Like clockwork soldiers, the city's army of construction contractors had been working incessantly through the night and day to clear wreckage, the fire fighters had been quenching the smoldering remains of buildings, and the police had been patrolling every street and sidewalk in a rather futile attempt to bring a sense of security to the newly paranoid young populace of this modern metropolis. Wafting up with the scent of salt water came the smell of days-old smoke and dust, clouds of it still hanging ominously over areas where homes and businesses, the physical aspects of peoples' very lives, had been shattered. It was clearly symbolic of the whispering fears that crawled through the city streets still, the ache of lost loved ones and the treacherous terror of the lingering dead infesting the minds of those still living with a terrible burden.

Skye knew all this clearly as he stood on the roof of this titanic fortress, taking in the group mind of the city's populace, inhaling the unconsciously shared thoughts along with the sea breeze and the scent of broken lives. It was an awful smell, a biting tang to the nose and mind at the same time, and one all too familiar to him. It was a smell of war, of battlefields, the kind of vicious, nasty battlefields without even the pretense of rules or honor that he'd spent the entirety of his teenage life shifting between. But most of all, the thing that truly bothered him, that which had kept him up all night holding vigil over this unsettled urban landscape, was that it was a scent he particularly associated with his thrice-damned sibling and the hideous plots that creature always had cooking. The merest thought of his odious twin was enough to keep him up permanently, and he'd spent the time in meditation on many things, but mostly he'd just searched. He _had_ to find Urth, find him and put a final end to whatever he had planned.

A pooling shadow formed at his heels, and he spared a fragment of his concentration to beckon the arriving personage with a gentle psychic caress. In a moment, the shadow had shaped fully into its feline grace, and then darted up his body in a spiraling crawl that ended on his shoulder.

"_Any luck Ben_?" Skye inquired without much hope, so that he was not disappointed when the cat expressed his lack of success with a dissatisfied tail-flick. That made two of them that couldn't track him down, and he listened to Vera reading out probability projections and intense mathematical algorithms far beyond his understanding, fully resigned to it being three of them without success when she finished.

Urth was brilliant beyond reckoning, truly a child of their parents, and would not be found unless he wished to be found. However, he was also _completely_ insane, and while recklessness was not one of the symptoms, Skye knew for a fact that his brother's illness did little to inspire the loyalty of others. Many times now he'd managed to sniff out that beast through the mistakes of disgruntled minions, and it was quickly looking like this would once again become his only chance. This was around the time Vera requested more data for her projections, and so Skye shook his head in resignation and turned his mind to the many other things he had to contemplate.

Raven's Room

Raven stared into the brand new mirror of her vanity table, nervously brushing her hair over and over again. She'd barely slept the night before, and this morning she'd showered, dressed, and groomed even earlier and more hastily than usual. Then, for some reason she was still distressing over, a completely irrational fear had taken hold in her mind, landing her firmly in a small cushioned chair as she stared into her mirror, brushed her hair, and worried.

Last night had been something… strange… something wonderful… and she had to admit that it had changed something inside of her. The reason for this particular freak out was simple: she'd checked her closet this morning and realized she had _nothing_ to wear. She didn't own a single thing other than these drab leotards and concealing cloaks, and for the first time in her life… she actually… _cared_! It was infuriating at the same time that it was mind-blowing at the same time that it was utterly embarrassing.

It was an odd insight into a mindset that she had once considered completely foreign, an alien world of teen magazines and clothing stores that had never, _and still didn't_, contain any interest for her. She had never (_and still didn't_, she had to keep reminding herself) cared about things like that for even a split second, but now that she actually had a guy she wanted to impress, what did her mind immediately flash to? In the end, it wasn't that she was nervous to meet with Skye again, it was that she was just so wrapped up in trying to think of how she could even momentarily be concerned with such drivel. Or at least that's what she kept telling herself.

She finally snapped out of it when she found herself checking through her arsenal of acne prevention medication and likewise utilitarian toiletries for _makeup_, sitting up in a huff and flinging her hairbrush across the room. She kicked herself mentally a dozen times for her cowardly rerouting of anxiety, almost stupefied by how irrational she was being here. First of all, she _didn't_ care about any of that stuff, even if general media had rubbed enough of it into her to make her wring her hands over her monochrome wardrobe in this instance. It _was_ that she was nervous to speak with him again, and it was silly of her to place those nerves into anything else.

What truly spoke to her in the end, what actually wound up calming her down even, was just _how_ goofy it was to worry about any of that useless crap where Skye was concerned _anyway_. The guy was blind in anything brighter than candlelight, and had perceptions that made the outer surface perhaps the _least_ interesting dimension of a being to interact with. She'd stumbled across a guy to whom beauty _truly_ _was_ only skin deep, and she'd managed to worry for forty-five minutes about what she was going to wear to their first _meditation_ meeting. At the same time that she chuckled about this to herself, the thought resonated with one of the many she'd sealed away yesterday, and a shady thread floated out of the knot of anxiety.

She was looking into a mirror with Skye at her back, looking to see what he saw when he looked at her. The breathtaking image reflected back was still frightening in its intensity, such depths of gorgeousness almost beyond her ability to comprehend, especially in light of her feelings about herself. Snapping that thread of memory back in its box, Raven caught her breath from the head rush it brought, resolving to untangle that mess as soon as possible. If it kept leaking like that, her powers would be funking up before dinner.

Sitting back down for a moment, she considered momentarily the fear within her heart. Rejection, mostly, was what it boiled down to, the fear that the gooey warmth within her would shrivel and die with a single word of exclusion from a source she had no control over and was completely incapable of predicting. The fear fizzled icily within her, and on a whim, she turned back to the mirror and looked somewhat more critically at her own reflection. Closing her eyes, she tentatively touched that knot of memories, once again drawing forth an image of the way Skye saw her. A tear escaped her eye momentarily, and she cut the memory off before her powers could react. That sight, taken a bit more carefully, did much to instill her with confidence, and she realized that perhaps she was doing a great deal better in the pure looks department than she might have feared.

Deciding that was as good a resolution as any, she girded herself to enter the world again. There was a breath of shadow, and she was gone.

Titans Tower Rooftop

Arriving on the roof, Raven was rather unsurprised to see Skye already there. For a while now it had been as though she knew generally where he was, as though some invisible thread connected them, and somehow she figured he was very much the cause of the phenomenon. In any case she strode silently toward him, staring at his back and noting that that handsome feline of his currently graced his shoulder. She continued to approach silently, knowing better than to believe she could surprise him and not wishing to disturb the heavy contemplation that hung around him like a regal drapery. Finally, she got within about ten feet of him and stopped immediately, a chill running through her body as though she'd just stepped into a meat locker. The chill passed quickly, and she immediately felt… well… _free_.

A day without meditation had left her struggling to contain her powers, unruly bolts and bands slipping out in ways she'd learned to keep discreet. The instant she'd passed that invisible wall, all the unconscious tension melted out of her instantly, as though bled into the very air. Granted all of her anxiety, lingering embarrassment, and all but a shadow of her pleasant gooey feeling had also evaporated, but considering the spectacular burden that had been lifted… she couldn't keep quiet any longer.

"Skye—" she reached out to grab his shoulder and turn him around, that whole '360 degree vision' thing not overcoming her natural desire to look at his face while they spoke.

"It's not a good idea to touch me right now," he said quickly, in a deathly empty voice, and her hand stopped an inch from his shoulder reflexively. She pulled it away and began to rub life into it, silently wondering at the intense cold of his flesh. If stepping near him had been a hard draft, nearing his skin had been like dry ice, and the cold had almost burned. She wondered, but she didn't let it stop her.

"Skye, good morning," she started, _very_ internally delighted that she'd once more managed to keep her very own neutral voice despite, uh, _everything_. "Er, did you move at all since last night?" she tried to continue with a bit of small talk before the conversation got started in earnest.

"Well, I don't need as much sleep as regular people, so I tend to disregard it unless I need to regenerate my powers or otherwise hit the astral plane. Even still I end up getting a great deal more than I actually require." His voice was still stiff and cold, but it began to gain an edge of life as he spoke. Recognizing this for what it was, Raven made her first move.

"No—it's okay," she muttered as she stepped up next to him and began to contemplate the bay as he had, "Don't worry about the mask. I certainly won't." There was a flash of shock from him that rippled through the air, then died a muffled death as the cold air around him sucked it back in. He pitched her a look stacked with meaning that lacked any trace of emotion, then turned his head silently back to the bay.

"So aren't you going to ask?" he inquired emptily, and she managed to start slightly at the question despite the muffling cold around Skye _and_ the fact that she'd been expecting it.

"I… kind of already know what it is," she responded after a moment, and Skye looked at his feet for a moment, breathing deeply of something that made him cringe in disgust.

"Yeah, this is my power when I don't hold it back. In the natural state, the vampiric embrace trolls the area around my body for sustenance at all times. It's not so bad when I'm alone in space, I'll release my grip on it and relax, since _I_ feel its touch at all times weather or not I contain it. However, when I'm around other people, I feel a rather strong obligation to keep it bottled up. Nothing kills a party, or any other kind of pleasant situation or sensation, faster than… well… _me_, and thus I've spent most of my life being avoided like some kind of leper or pariah."

"Well, I… I kind of like it," Raven managed to admit, relaxing into the cool sensation of utter calm like it was a favorite chair rather than a chilling pox on her soul. To be free of emotion… without having to work at it… it was what she'd envied in him most, and now she found out—ah hell. She'd _always_ known that it could be like this.

"Heh, I find it kind of surprising to hear you say that," and it was odd to hear him talk without emotion and yet somehow still express humor, "considering if I'd let loose like this three days ago you'd probably be trying to strip the flesh from my bones right now."

"Ah, well…" she averted her face, suddenly grateful for the embracing chill that kept the blush from surfacing, "I guess I've grown up a little since then. I was… afraid of you, of what your powers could do. But this…" Raven paused to appreciate the caress of spiritual calm that burgeoned out of Skye in delicious excess, "_this_ is like a dream come true."

"Well hey, inner peace is about the only thing I've ever had too much of," Skye joked in that painfully deadpan tone, "so help yourself. Anyway," he changed the subject quickly, "didn't you have some meditation to do? I've been reading some chaos in your energy since you came up here, and I can't help but think you'd want to get on top of that."

Raven was stunned, and no doubt would have had an episode of some kind if the circumstances had been other than what they were. As the words registered in her head, it was as though someone had pulled the rug out from under her and she was falling backward into oblivion. A piercing ringing filled her ears as she felt the universe begin the slow process of crumbling around her. He'd… he'd as much as slapped her in the face with a rejection, right off the bat…

"Lets go ahead and get started then, we can link up once we're underway," he finished his statement, bringing Raven's self-destruction to a skidding halt. She took a deep breath and tried to wrap her mind around what he just said. Filing her almost-terminal panic attack away for later self-kicking, Raven managed a slightly bored smile and a nod, despite her burgeoning confusion. She didn't know if he'd detected her borderline mental catastrophe, but he continued with "If that's all right I mean. I could understand if you'd not want me messing around while you're trying to iron out your soul and all…"

"No!" she snapped a little too eagerly, then looked away quickly by reflex to hide another blush that would be consumed by Skye's aura, "no… that's fine. _Normally_ I need quiet and complete isolation to keep everything… _frosty_… but somehow I don't think that'll be a problem this time." He nodded at her, all appearances pointing toward his total indifference. Only the slight waves of pleasant sensation penetrating the muffle of his vampiric embrace spoke to how happy he was to have synced with her in this.

"Great…" he mumbled, shifting slightly—his first movement since she'd arrived—and urging Ben off of his shoulder and into his arms. "I'm going to find some shade before the sun gets to bothering me. Please, don't wait up on my account."

Raven didn't turn as he walked back toward the center of the roof and the stretching dawn shadows that crept along the expansive surface. Breathing slightly more heavily than she felt comfortable with, she examined closely the way the pleasant draining did not subside as he moved away. Somewhere in there he'd begun draining her directly, separate from the automatic touch of his ever-hungering vampiric core, and though she hadn't had the guts to _ask_ for such a service, it was exactly what she'd desired, and she couldn't help but be appreciative.

Ending her nerve-ridden contemplations, she cleared her mind, stepped off of the ground, and began to lower herself into the quiet place where she would reorganize her body's energy from. Hovering in midair, she whispered her mantra once… and was there. It had been a long time since it was that easy.

Raven's Mindscape

Staring out at the infinite starscape in which she was suspended in her state of oneness, Raven began to consider the systematic repairs she'd need to make to her control matrix, her distribution paradigm, and of course, the obnoxious knot of strife she'd set aside to get herself functioning the other day. For a while, she was totally absorbed in this, managing to forget Skye, her friends, and everything else in the wash of deep technical concentration. Finally, realizing she'd need to go deeper to get most of this done, she began the process of complete introspection.

In almost no time at all, she had arrived in her own inner mind, the microcosmic constructed representation she had herself put together to regulate her vicious powers. Generally after such a long period without meditation, the place would be looking rather shabby, and there was no exception this time. Floating stones that should have formed distinct continents spiraled in chaotic masses while shooting stars and milky auroras melted through the air. There was _something_ however, a sense of calm that was very rare to this place, a kind of depression in the atmosphere she wasn't at all familiar with. It didn't take too many guesses to place this phenomenon, and Raven moved her meta-avatar through her mind in an attempt to discover what else might have resulted from submitting to Skye's aid.

Before she could manage this, however, there came a tapping sound, of all things, as though someone were clicking a quarter against a pain of glass. It took her completely off guard—everything here was supposed to be a product of her own mind after all—and the all-encompassing, incredibly obnoxious sound was nothing of her creation. That left one person as the logical source, and that lead her to exactly where the noise was coming from. The forbidden portal… a rather melodramatic name she'd always thought, but some of her aspects had a distinct flare for drama, and it was those divisions of her mind that gave this place shape, so she abided by the names they chose. She arrived to find the tapping noise blasting out of the portal's flat expanse, and quickly moved to remedy the situation. Standing at the edge of the swirling vortex, she beckoned for his entry with a teasing thread of telepathic energy.

As he transmitted through the gateway, his energy morphed wildly to conform to her personal reality. First an outline formed, a dim tracery of a man within the greater outline of her trademark winged-cowl shaped portal frame. On his left side, grayish mist congealed into the wire-frame of his body, while on his right, a thousand discreet streamers of silver light poured in from the plane of the portal to fill in the void. As she waited patiently, the great mess of motion and sparkling solidified into a discernable presentation, and he had officially arrived.

Stepping forward to greet him, she couldn't help but note the stylish wardrobe change he'd managed to conform his energy into. He was casual dressed for comfort and utility, as far as she could tell, sporting a loose black designer T-shirt hanging low over exceptionally comfortable-looking black denim shorts and a pair of sneakers so black she expected them to start leaching the gray out of the stony ground. The look was almost alarmingly effective considering his starkly white skin, glaring out as chiseled biceps and calves and that rakish, unbelievably perfect face… surprisingly sans-sunglasses. His empty whites took in her world as he finished settling his mental probe into its rather unique manifestation.

"My… but what do we have here?" he asked in clear wonderment, his eyes widening appreciably as the crimson stars and eclipsed suns illuminated a plane of rocky crags in an endless nebulae. Raven almost choked on her own tongue when she realized he was genuinely impressed, and managed to squeeze her delight into something resembling smug satisfaction as she grabbed him by the arm and muscled him out onto the platform before the portal.

"Well Skye," and she was ecstatic to hear her voice as calmly smug still, "I'd like to welcome you to the plane of my mind. This is all a construct I use to help keep my emotions restrained and maintain spiritual fortitude."

"Yes I see…" Skye sounded distant as he swept his eyes around the panoramic view, "a quasi-reality resulting from translated manifestation of the macro-dipheminal feedback of the conscious and subconscious luminal circuits..." he paused briefly after snapping out his utterly accurate psi-jargon analysis of her construction, "It's… well…"

Raven was still rather laden with swelling pride at how much she'd impressed him with what she considered a rather common introspective tool, but his final hesitation tipped her off. She felt herself bracing for his dismissal, the moment where he mentioned the thousands of better ones he'd seen in his travels through the galaxy. Though she was careful to betray no outer change, she'd wound herself quite tightly before he finally found the words he'd been looking for.

"Spectacular." He finally finished, and stood calmly taking in her world though those expansive senses.

"Oh, well, it serves my purposes," Raven muttered demurely before she realized what he'd said, then froze in a quiet paroxysm of shock when it finally registered. Quirking an eyebrow at her impressive modesty and sudden stiff silence, Skye went on with his praise.

"I must admit, this is impressive by any interpretation," he began, reversing Raven's grip and pulling her stiffly unresponsive self a few more steps out into her meta-substituted microcosm. "I've seen other astral beacons like my own, and I've seen the inside of innumerable conscious minds… but to take the two and intertwine them like this… its just plain neat. Almost like the natural progression of some comatose delusions… only more responsive to the—" he went on and on in eloquent, complex, and continually novel praise. As he began to break down her world and describe it in terms of high-order psionic theory, she finally got her wits about her and cut off his tirade. As she gave him her best blankly annoyed glare, she tried to recall having ever known a person more fond of his own voice.

"Thanks for the lecture megabrain, but I didn't let you in here to let you tell me things I already know." Their eyes met and he smiled nervously at her, and suddenly she was very much aware that their arms were linked, though she managed to keep it off her face as she continued, "I let you in because I still have plenty of questions… and it was you who suggested we talk while I work."

"Uh, so?" Skye asked, eyes remaining locked to hers until she finally pried them away, pulling out of his grip at the same time.

"So follow me, and don't _mess_ with anything," she snapped at him, then took of at a moderate hover toward the edge of the small island of stone holding the portal. After the slightest hesitation, he followed right after her, stepping from the edge of the precipice without even flinching. The glowing black stone that caught his feet and bore him along after her was there right on time, though she found herself mildly ticked that he hadn't asked for it formally. Pressing that petty thought from her mind, she formulated her first query.

Titans Tower Common Room

"Are you guy's seein this?" Cyborg asked, tone steeped in heavy incredulity, raising his voice slightly over the clank of silverware and ceramic plates moving at relatively high speed.

"I don't know," Robin replied, almost too calmly in the face of this situation, "all things considered, it's most likely just an odd dream I'm having."

"Well that means you and me are having the same dream man, and last time I checked, that kinda thing doesn't happen," it was Beast Boy who responded, face atwist with an expression of utter disbelief as he stood well away from the spectacle of gastronomical excess that currently held their complete… and _horrified_… attention.

"It is my belief that the condition of our awakeness holds no bearing on how… odd… this spectacle is," chimed in Starfire where she stood behind Robin, "this is… how should I say?—off of this planet?"

"Well hell, I didn't bake these waffles to sit by and not get any!" Cyborg snapped decisively, stepping toward the table and taking a seat across from the young blond woman currently stuffing her face with everything that came to hand.

"Dude… I _seriously_ don't think it's a good idea to—" but Beast Boy was too late, and there was a blurr of movement and a twanging thump that caused everyone in the room to gasp harshly.

"Okay, you can have em all…" Cyborg almost whimpered as he pulled his hand slowly away from the quickly dwindling stack of waffles, the fork that had been planted into the table between his fingers still vibrating slowly from the force it had been launched with, "I'll just get some leftovers!"

Terra had started the morning off normally enough, coming in to the smell of batter and bacon at about the same time everyone else managed to. They were generally pleased to see her up and about, if still utterly unresponsive, and as Cyborg finished working his turbo, 6-tiered waffle iron, they had all settled down to what appeared to be a wonderfully normal breakfast considering the circumstances of the past week. Robin had popped open the day's special edition of the Jump Times to see how the media had managed to twist the little he'd authorized for release, Beast Boy had commandeered the funnies and taken to his ritual of trying to get Starfire to comprehend earth humor, and Cyborg had flipped on the big screen on the far side of the room to search in vain for something that wasn't news reports about the battles of the past few days. That was around the time it had happened.

First there had been nothing, another quiet morning's breakfast. Then there had been the oddest growling noise, drawing everyone's attention inexorably toward their mute companion. Her hair was hanging down over her eyes as she leaned forward over the table, and there had been a distinct gleam of… _hunger_… through the shimmering golden veil. Some instinct that went deeper than thought had them all up and away from the table just in time to escape the _frenzy_.

"I don't know what's up with her," Robin commented, beginning to go slightly green as Terra finished off the waffles and began blazing through the sausage patties, washing it all down with occasional pulls from the syrup bottle, "but I know who can tell us."

Raven's Mind

"So as these stones are organized?" Skye asked calmly as he watched thousands of small pebbles sift in swirling clouds through the air around Raven.

"As these stones are sorted, so is my spiritual energy and soul," came her detached explanation as she orchestrated the dance of a billion pebbles through three dimensions of exceptional complexity. Eyes aglow with her power, she floated in full lotus position at the center of the spiraling mass as Skye watched from outside, a veritable lightning storm of black telekinetic force permeating the gravely miasma. It was kind of odd to speak like this while her power was in full force around her, but as far as she could tell it wasn't bothering Skye, and with the chilly presence still subduing her powers, it was easy to multitask. "I found long ago that it was much more satisfying to sort through these then abstract discreet quantities of my power."

"I can certainly understand that," agreed Skye amiably as he watched with those mysterious empty eyes, seeming to catch and record every minute motion of the representative tokens that cascaded around Raven. She had the creeping feeling that he was memorizing her organizational system for some unknown purpose, and almost lost control of the milling clouds of her power in the face of these self-conscious contemplations.

"So Skye, tell me," she began to ask yet more questions to distract herself from how weird it felt to have someone watching her perform this most personal of self-maintenance tasks, "What's it like to cruise around space the way you do? I imagine it must be interesting to see the galaxy."

"Oh, traveling is certainly nice, I just wish I could see a better side of the cosmos now and then." As he answered, his gaze never wavered, and soon actually seemed to draw in the substance of Raven's world like two milky pits. "I mean, the only times I drop out of slipspace are when I'm on somebody's ass, or just as often the other way around. My business takes me everywhere," he continued, a bit of genuine wistfulness penetrating his handsome drone, "but the _nature_ of my business means I'm rarely able to kick back and enjoy the local flavor."

Listening to his answer and trying desperately not to mess up in front of him, Raven managed to do just that, loosing kilter on an energy pattern off to one side and overcompensating. The resulting wobble kicked out a single pebble from the storm, and it quite naturally arced out directly at Skye. In a movement she was incredibly far from being able to follow, his hand appeared between his face and the stone, and he was palming a shard of her soul the next moment.

"Like I was saying," he continued, examining the pebbled closely as he talked, and Raven didn't know weather to be relieved that he didn't taunt her or mortified that he was pawing at such a personal part of her like that, so much so that she almost missed what he was talking about. "—and so as you can imagine, most jobs that come in on the work lists are so incredibly far beneath my talents that the actual action is often no more than a few minutes of me disabling the perp and slamming him, her, or _it_… into crystal stasis for transport to The Can. Those slave drivers at the IDP are merciless, and if I'm anywhere in their communication network—and I'm not _clearly_ working or in transit to work—well, they have their ways of making me regret it."

"As fascinating as all this is," Raven said without sarcasm, "_do you mind_?" The glowing black glare she pointed at him made no impact in the deep white stare he returned, but her meaning was clear enough. He shrugged, opened his palm, looked down, and just about jumped out of his skin in surprise. Snarling in shock, he dropped the pebble like a glowing hot iron and hopped backward, causing Raven's mind to pop with alarm as she froze the storm of tiny stones and blinked through space without even thinking about it. Appearing next to him, she glared down, pulse racing, seeking what had caused him such an enormous shock.

As she continued to search silently for the source of his alarm, she continued to find absolutely jack. Her alarm abated quickly to be replaced with anger. Granted there was a little bit of disappointment at the extraordinary anticlimax… but… nah, it was all anger—she was pretty fucking livid right about then. Gathering the enormous storm of indignation around herself as the arsenal for her assault on Skye, the world around them itself began to change with her distinctly darkening mood. And why not? This world was nothing _but_ a creative way of translating the psionic pulse wavelengths coming off her mind.

The gathering stormy overcast that blotched out the stars, the circling flock of sinister, four-eyed crows, the harsh wind, was all just this incredible paradigm's way of reacting to the elevating frequency and plummeting wavelength of Raven's vicious thoughts. Still not quite used to this concept, it took Skye a moment to act, but when he did, it was immediately obvious.

"Okay, stop right there," Skye said confidently, and suddenly a pulse of hard chill shattered the mood and squelched the environmental effects. It was as though a director had yelled 'cut!' so forcefully did the scene smack into the brick wall of Skye's ironclad emotional influence. As the now chilly world took on a glazed appearance, the clouds parted, the birds fell from the sky like a rain of rubber chickens (with appropriate bouncing and squeaky noises when they hit things) and the wind cut out like a switch had been flipped. Raven stood motionless for a moment, a rather contemplative look on her face, then focused on Skye once more, now sporting a slightly bored expression.

"…If you only knew what I planned to do to you," she stated flatly, then turned and began to walk away along the winding stone road that floated suspended in the starry void. She did not turn back, and in the icy crisp air around them, Skye knew she wouldn't, and so he twisted his own thought pulse and was rewarded by suddenly popping up right in front of her. That manually imposed bored look didn't waver, but her surprise was evident from the length of time it took her to respond. "When did you…?" she started to ask, but Skye stopped her.

"Its not so difficult, once you get to understand this place's mechanics, to start manipulating them a little," Skye said simply, and couldn't help but feel that his icing was quelling all kinds of deep uncertainty from Raven right then. "But really, that's beside the point," he changed the subject smoothly, "take another look at what was bugging me—sorry, it caught me a little off guard is all, but I think you'll understand if you see it."

Skye ended his partial explanation by twisting the space of her world until they were standing at the spot where he'd left a few years of his life lying on the ground, wrung from his my pure shock. Raven, unable to feel anything on the subject of Skye's newfound power over her mental realm, was instead able to follow Skye's pointing hand down to the ground, giving him the benefit of the doubt for the time being. When she finally located what had scared him so, it still didn't seem like enough to warrant his outburst. At least not at first.

Lying on the ground was the single pebble Skye had so casually plucked from the air, representing a minute portion of her power and spirit. It was jet black, exactly as it should have been, and it took her several long moments of observation before she recognized what Skye had gotten so upset over. Suspended around the tiny stone were four discreet, gentle white spheres of light, each one forming the point of a tetrahedral configuration in a 3-D area with the pebble at the center. It dawned on her at last, and she almost could have gasped herself.

"Do you get it now?" Skye tried to confirm, sensing the tiny spike of emotion through the slowly lifting damper on her soul.

"A piece of your soul…" Raven began, then stopped as the gleaming pebble absorbed her complete attention, and she found herself reaching out to it almost involuntarily.

"Was sucked right out of me by a piece of yours!" Skye snapped at her, and the pebble vanished from where it lay, taking up a new position in the air just above Skye's outstretched hand. Raven stood quickly, her eyes following the rock like there was a magnetic attraction drawing them, and she reached for it again, only to have Skye snatch it away and press a hand to her shoulder to hold her back. Engaging in an impromptu game of keep-away, Raven crawling all over him in her blind, thoughtless attempt to get the stone, Skye shouted, "and it seems to have an unsavory effect on your respect for personal space too!"

Who knows what would have happened had the situation not been forced right then, but it was, and _how_.

"RAVEN!" boomed an enormous, mind-breakingly loud voice from the heavens, and the shock and pain of the world dissolving around him knocked the pebble right out of Skye's hands and off into the collection of its twin stones still floating half-organized next to them. The last thing he saw as an indescribable sinking sensation in the general vicinity of his vampiric core pierced his soul and the artificial world dissolved like a melting frame of film reel was the stone touching its compatriots… and the chain reaction it triggered.

Titan's Tower Rooftop

"Raven, I do not wish to disturb your meditation—" Starfire began delicately, whispering to the young woman floating serenely in lotus position and mumbling her mantra, only to be cut off by an explosion of activity that had her on her heels with a scream. The moment she'd spoken to her friend, Raven had shrieked and fallen right out of the air, striking the ground hard and then coming to rest dazedly, propped up only by her elbows as she stared at the world, blinking slowly.

"Oh Raven—" Starfire panicked and began to formulate an apology as she rushed to her friend's side, "I did not mean to startle you—" but she choked to silence as Raven leapt to her feet with a wild look in her eyes. "You… you must b-be angry…" Starfire mumbled timidly as the other girl began to shake, a slow trembling spreading through her body. "Uh…" Starfire had never seen Raven look so fantastically enraged, and it was all she could do to squeak out, "I-I… w-w-wished only t-t-to seek… Friend Skye?"

"Skye!" Raven snapped, and her trembling stopped cold, her body jerked unnaturally once, then she spun on her heel and stared across the rooftop, her cape fluttering with the force of her jerky motions. Starfire didn't know what was going on, but it only got weirder from there. Across the roof, exactly where Raven looked, Skye knelt, keeled over in agony, having apparently just crawled out of a space between some heating ducts where he'd been hiding from the sun. Without further hesitation, Raven began to sprint toward him like Olympic athlete.

"No, wait—Raven stop!" Skye shouted into the ground as he struggled to stand, holding up a hand as if to ward her away, completely failing to curtail her from her irresistable charge. Starfire, too stunned by this oddity to even move, watched in amazement as Raven tackled Skye like a linebacker, slamming him into the ground, at which point the two began to spark and fume with a fantastic electrical storm of pure black and white lightning. Her eyes defying her ability to comprehend, she bore witness as Raven, face frozen in a mask of bliss, struggled to press every inch of herself against Skye. The young man was clearly wracked with every bit as much agony, writhing convulsively beneath her, so tortured he was unable to muster a single whit of that fantastic agility he'd demonstrated, muscles spasming as he vented hideous, agonized wails.

Suddenly the light storm exploded, a wash of shock knocking over everything that wasn't fastened down (and bending or warping all that was), with Starfire being no exception. As she hit the ground hard, straining her eyes against the light and digging into the roof with her fingers, she could just make out the two small shapes at the center of the storm, even as great gouts of black lighting with white streamers began to leap from that same spot and dig gouges out of the rooftop around her. And that's when things began to get _really_ weird.

The sound of singing—that's right, _singing_—filtered though the noise of the light storm, eventually filling Starfire's ears so completely that she could no longer hear the destruction. The song was like that of birds, if the birds were both ghosts and angels at the same time, and Starfire neither knew nor cared what the lilting lyrics might have meant, far too beautiful was the pristine sound. There was a sudden itching and burning in her right arm, creeping up from the center of her palm in a spiraling heat that wrapped twice around her neck and finally paused as it lit her cheek. The lights then became too intense to stand, and she clenched her eyes against the pain, her whole world filling with nothing but the ethereal, mournful singing, the buffeting of the explosive lights, and the intense heat radiating through her right arm and face. Then it stopped.

"Starfire?" a voice seemed to be calling from far away, but the dream the young woman was having was just so nice, she really didn't want to leave. Her friend was here, after all.

"Starfire!" the voice was more insistent, and this time she recognized the voice as Robin's. She suddenly knew that he was searching for her, and she HAD to go to him. Waving goodbye to her friend, who she realized somewhat sadly that she would never be able to remember once she left, the darkness around her cleared.

"Uh… Robin?" she found herself muttering as the brightness that shot into her brain slowly focused from a blurred red and black blob to a very handsome, very concerned face. She realized that she was lying flat on the ground, the clear morning sky stretching out above her, and that she had no clue how she'd come to be that way.

"Guys, she's awake!" Robin snapped eagerly to the others, who were apparently off to some place that was outside of the alien girl's field of view and too much effort too look over at right now.

"Wish I could say the same for these two!" Beast Boy shouted back, he and Cybrg having agreed to grab Raven and Skye respectively to get them down to medbay after the mysterious explosion that had destroyed the roof and brought them all up here.

The swirling splotches of hard, eye-numbing gray that migrated steadily over Raven's skin, clothing, and cloak, colliding and separating like drops of water dancing over a skillet, bleeding the color from where they passed only for it to creep back in again as they left… it simply couldn't be contained by the normal bounds ofBeast Boy'sweirdness scale, even the one he'd custom devised for things involving their mystical ally. In fact, despite his strong loyalty toward his beautiful friend, nothing could make him touch her until after he'd used a piece of torn up roof material to ensure that the gray splotches wouldn't come off and attack him, earning him a dirty look from his large mechanical compatriot. When he finally lifted her up off of the highly suggestive position she'd collapsed onto Skye in, the feel of her clammy, chilled body wasn't nearly as frightening as she looked, but it definitely provided disturbing counterpoint.

When he shifted Raven, the two guys got a look at Skye, and he was hands-down _worse_. His body was still that colorless powder white, but his face had somehow been twisted with unsettling changes. His left eye, once a distressingly empty pool of white, had been bled ink black, the iris and pupil striking out from the background in a harsh yellow. Spiraling out in grotesque, intricate patterns from that hideous eye were deep black scars, the actual lines like raised skin ruptures that twisted in unnatural, somehow meaningful pathways across only the left half of his face and neck.

"Would ja look at _that_!" Cyborg muttered in shocked, disturbed wonder when, as Raven was lifted up further, it was revealed that her left hand still gripped tightly to Skye's left wrist, lifting his arm with her as she went. Beast Boy gave Cyborg a dubious, slightly frightened look, then pulled harder, only to find that the grip couldn't be broken. Even as he transformed into a gorilla and lifted her bodily into the air, her grip supported the pale man's weight and he was lifted too.

"Damn, what the hell could _do_ that?" Cyborg exclaimed as Beast Boy gave up and flopped onto the ground in human shape, Raven's limp, gray-speckled body lying face-down across his lap. Seeing as no one even bothered to acknowledge his question (Robin was distracted by those green doe-eyes, Beast Boy was hip deep in woman), Cyborg huffed once, then hefted the young man and woman easily into the air together, putting one over each shoulder with their linked hands behind his neck, and then making his way toward the medbay as Robin, trying and failing to exact answers from the dazed Starfire as they walked slowly, hand in hand, followed closely behind.

Beast Boy was left sitting alone on the roof, still too worried about Terra to really care about this weird ass event. He'd always known those two would get together (Raven and Skye that is—he was still clueless about the much more obvious and… well… actually _existent_ relationship closer by), though he hadn't expected it to be quite so… explosive. After all that stress, it was actually kind of a relief that his good friend wouldn't be alone, and he let that be a balm to ease his mind as he set his sights squarely on a certain blond.

Preview: What the hell's going on this time? Well, who can tell, I mean, I sure as shooting don't have a clue. Anyway, there are some more weird-ass dreams to go with these weird-ass interactions, and the preponderance of oddity will be something to see for sure. Tune in next time for: To Dream of You


End file.
